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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

#801

Post by code_biologist »

shalmanese wrote: post #799
csharpminor wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most employers provision ~100sq/ft per employee. In SF real estate goes for $50-$70 per sq/ft per month. Obviously there’s negotiating that happens. You could do a lot of travel with a 5-7k budget per month. There are a ton of variables- agree more analysis is needed.

Office rentals are quoted at dollars per square foot per year so divide that number by 12 and you realize it's not that large after all.

My understanding is that's kind of a regional thing. California markets typically quote $/sf/month and pretty much the rest of the US does $/sf/year. Too easy to confuse. Been a while since I was in that game though.

But yes, you're right that typical high rise office space in the bay is around $50-80/sf/year or $4.50-7/sf/mo. Or $450-700/mo per employee at 100 sf per employee.

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

#802

Post by agilob »

savanaly wrote: post #166
agilob wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I'm in the minority here, but I choose Teams over Slack any day. I much prefer thread-based chat than message based chat. Teams forces people to use top message as a topic, then respond to messages under that topic. Slack message is just a message. You want to search something on Teams, you get full threads, chat is part of documentation. You want to find something on Slack, you need to click on date of the re…

I'm quite confused because almost all conversation in my company's slack happens in threads. Maybe your impression of Slack was formed in a time when they didn't have threads?

I use Slack currently and used it before. Threads in Slack are "optional", then they are 1st class citizen in Teams.

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

#803

Post by tempestn »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #675
tempestn wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll see increasing numbers of Canadians working for US companies (that's already happening). Of course that's little different than hiring from areas in the US outside the major hubs. Somewhat lower average salaries, but similar skills and work habits, same time zones, etc. Expanding further, it's already the case that if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to…

It will be less stable, but I think I agree with your analysis ( and in real terms, when was it really stable .. 50s? ). Oddly, I think it may only add to the 'Previous team didn't know what they were doing. Fix it.' vicious cycle. In a sense, companies will be re-inventing the big 3 consulting companies. It is not just just English and skill set that is the issue. In my neck of the woods, I just dealt with otherwise…

Yeah, this sort of thing has been my experience and understanding as well.

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

#804

Post by tempestn »

adammichaelc wrote: post #796
tempestn wrote: post #632

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you'll see increasing numbers of Canadians working for US companies (that's already happening). Of course that's little different than hiring from areas in the US outside the major hubs. Somewhat lower average salaries, but similar skills and work habits, same time zones, etc. Expanding further, it's already the case that if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to…

> if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability. I know. This is going to sound crazy. The pay gap…

Nice, you clearly have more experience with overseas hiring than I do. I've attempted it a few times, but haven't been able to consistently find people who were available and some combination of sufficiently good & inexpensive to make it worthwhile vs hiring domestically (in Canada in my case), given the added challenges of time zones, potential language barriers, etc. I'm sure they're out there, but my impression was that you can't just go and hire an equivalent developer for half the price easily.

Care to share any of your strategies for finding talent and hiring in India?

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

#805

Post by bato »

grepfru_it wrote: post #299
mardifoufs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>i) Effective immediately, we will be moving laptop refreshes from three years to four years. ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, saving significant cost and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations Layoffs and having to use teams? Talk about a morale hit

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.

Pretty much all new features from acquisition news are on azure (packages, codespaces etc).

Which is why outages usually match Azure outages.

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

#806

Post by brmgb »

matwood wrote: post #160
brmgb wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me when Slack allows collaborative editing of powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets. I think there is little overlap between the part of the companies which benefit from Teams and the part that wants to use Slack.

> collaborative editing of powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets Hahaha...if you want collaborative editing of anything, use GSuite. The MS tool suite is a joke for collaboration.

The idea is hilarious. GSuite is basically unusable. It's miles behind excel for anything serious and has no equivalent to powerpoint at all.

Some of you don't understand you live in a very tiny bubble and entreprise needs are very different from your experience.

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

#807

Post by brmgb »

brazzledazzle wrote: post #259
goalieca wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gsuite has the best collaborative editing.

What you don't like collaborating in the excel web app and wiping your coworker's active cell edit from existence by inserting a row somewhere above it? Next you're going to tell me you don't enjoy powerpoint web app randomly changing formatting in bulleted lists when you do something as complex as hitting enter to add a new line. You can tell where Microsoft spent their energies (outlook, teams, maybe onenote?) and…

No one uses the web app. You can obviously collaborate from the actual piece of software.

Every discussion about Teams boils down to the same thing: software engineers needs when it comes to collaboration are low so they are happy using an expensive text chat client and they don't understand how the rest of their company actually works and what they need.

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

#808

Post by fidgewidge »

bambataa wrote: post #793
ricardobeat wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that’s the case then why hasn’t the shift happened sooner?

I wonder about this too. The UK has lower salaries than west coast US and a large pool of suitable workers. Big tech has a presence but why haven’t they moved their main operations to the UK?

Once you decide to go to "Europe" then the question becomes why the UK and not somewhere vastly cheaper like Romania or Poland. Wages in the UK are lower but wages in eastern Europe are much lower still.

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

#809

Post by flippinburgers »

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…

Seeing as we are predicting the future, I'm more concerned about AI driven "development" then I am remote work finally becoming a stable, ubiquitous thing.

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

#810

Post by palata »

JenrHywy wrote: post #696
palata wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, if you accept to work for free, a good business decision would be to stop paying you. Would you act personally surprised or offended or hurt if your company made that business decision?

That would be a terrible business decision, because the company would have no employees.

You missed part of the idea: "if you accept to work for free".

The parent was saying (if I understood correctly): "stop complaining, you should accept the business decision, because that's what a company does: optimize the profit without caring about how the employees feel".

I was just saying that as an employee, you have the right to negotiate your working conditions. If you accept all the "business decisions" because they help the company make more profit, then they will stop paying you. That would be completely rational as a business decision.

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