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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

#851

Post by hello_moto »

simplicio wrote: post #514
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…

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…

Prior to Pandemic, hi-tech worker retention rate was 2.5 years in my area (this is not in Bay Area, Seattle, or New York).

People switch jobs frequently is the norm anyway.

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

#852

Post by hello_moto »

acheron wrote: post #770
WoodenChair wrote: post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Being social is fine. That’s what I have real friends for. I don’t need pretend friends at work.

Social != friends.

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

#853

Post by andrew_ »

louwrentius wrote: post #833
andrew_ wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd hardly call a 30 year professional career in various fields and collars as "survivor bias." The network of people I've been exposed to over that period of time alone puts a hole in that argument. Tossing out that term to try and justify a terribly flawed argument is as silly as the unsubstantiated statistic provided as emotional evidence.

N=1 anekdote doesn’t count. Personal experience doesn’t count large population stats count and it’s not looking good for large swats of people. But I have it good so the system works! Yea sure, it’s really anout you. The selfishness, the lack of care for others is so ingrained. If the majority of your country is dirt poor and has to work multiple jobs the system clearly doesn’t work.

> N=1 anekdote doesn’t count. Personal experience doesn’t count large population stats count and it’s not looking good for large swats of people.

Congratulations, Comrade. By your own logic, your original post must then be dismissed. Glory to the Soviet Science!

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

#854

Post by JoshCole »

mshake2 wrote: post #363
JoshCole wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can, you just need to point out in what ways a thing is not adequately explained by stupidity.

Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and I'll have my wife's brother arrested. -Jared Vennett, The Big Short

Adam McKay and Charles Randolph wrote a script. Therefore, Jared is wrong about what he is capable of doing and what is he capable of learning. However, Jared is based on a real person - Gregg Lippman. Despite this, after a brief search I found no public information about the arrest of this brother. So either Gregg didn't say this or he said it and it wasn't true, because people in his position would have been told the difference during the course of their life or maybe I didn't search hard enough - but I don't think I should search harder, so if you really feel this is strong support please provide evidence it is so.

I'm more interested in building explanations on reality than supporting my positions with comedic fiction. I'll share some small part of my explanation. I apologize for my lack of brevity.

In game playing we have the ability to calculate the time to calculate and store perfect play in various games. After around the complexity of chess we get to the point where it is physically impossible to store perfect play because the combinatorial explosion generates more states than we have atoms to work with in our universe. This forces approximation, which forces error, which means that for almost every task in this universe error is not only present but absolutely demanded. In multi-agent settings these issues only get worse, because not only is the state space very high due to the combinatorics, but in addition the optimal policy is a function of other policies. The connecting point here is that since our problems are a superset of things we know to be physically unrealizable it follows that error is inevitable and therefore the observance of stupidity relative to theoretical ideals is inevitable.

    Founder culture is completely at odds with sophisticated cynicism.
    - Paul Graham

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

#855

Post by fsckboy »

rswail wrote: post #819
fsckboy wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kno…

While I understand your argument, and it has some legitimacy, particularly in relation to anti-trust regulation and moving back to actually enforcing the laws, as opposed to what has been happening since the late 1980s. Low-skill workers only have the power to withdraw their labor (which is their only negotiating leverage) when their labor is required. As for unions getting higher wages for their members, that's thei…

> is what used to be implemented

no, anti-trust laws talk about abuse of monopoly power, which can only be established after years of said abuse and which leave many of the negative patterns untouched. I'm talking about using market share itself as the metric

> "hard core" market solution

I call it hard-core because most of the arguments for "free market" solutions wind up protecting large businesses. I'm talking about making sure to subject large businesses to market forces for the benefit of consumers, whose jobs I'm not willing to protect. To put it in vulgar political terms, neither the socialist Democrats nor the capitalist Republicans would support what I'm talking about, that's how you know it's good. And it's more of a thought experiment, it's like saying "I know the answer, carbon capture!" when carbon capture is the unknown hard part, but you have to think this way to achieve a breakthrough. I'm focusing attention on the parts of the market that are failing.

> not at the expense of unemployment

you're writing patiently as if you're teaching me something (which i don't mind, i'm pedantic af, welcome friend), but unions getting higher wages at the cost of higher unemployment is standard econ 101, taught in every class everywhere, except maybe Political Economy where they talk about workers's feelings.

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

#856

Post by hot_gril »

rswail wrote: post #824
hot_gril wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote means they trust their employees to perform without physical eyes on them. "Open office" layout is designed to have eyes on your screen providing constant pressure to actually work, nothing else. Market currently says that employees pay to work remote. When I was shopping around for jobs recently, every offer I got for remote work was less than a similar in-person job. At my current job, I got a pay cut for mo…

Open offices were designed to minimize the space per employee. A "happy side effect" is that it made it easier for micro-managers to micro-manage.

Our open office shows that it's not about space. There's still a lot of space between desks, enough to have cubicles. There are several empty seats even. The rest of the office has tons of barely-used employee space, like big table tennis rooms and open seating. The desks are always arranged in a way that the screens are facing everyone walking by.

To put it another way, I can just take my laptop and work in a common area with a wall behind me, and I get more space and privacy. That's what I do. I'm not slacking, I just don't like eyes on my screen at all hours and people constantly interrupting me.

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

#857

Post by hello_moto »

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.

Auth0 (Okta) has quite a few Latin American (Argentina) and Spain workers. Don't know if that is growing or not.

> 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.

There are hundred thousands of jobless hi-tech professionals, let's see if this state stay for long.

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

#858

Post by guhidalg »

mvanbaak wrote: post #593
guhidalg wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's never going to happen. Most people (maybe not you, you savant) need someone's physical presence to see them as a real person. The phrase "Out of sight, out of mind" did not become irrelevant just because I can email someone across the world.

Try having video calls.

I do, every day. I still don't have an emotional attachment to the people I'm video calling from across the world. The folks nearby? Yes.

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

#859

Post by hello_moto »

Ancalagon wrote: post #541
LAC-Tech wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity". Good. Because that's the reality we live in. Acting personally surprised or offended or hurt when a business…

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.

He's hurt he didn't get the same benefits as full-time. That's why.

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

#860

Post by hello_moto »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #694
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'm not proposing any changes in legislation to make it easier to fire anyone. What I am advocating for is for people here to see reality more clearly.

What you're doing is playing Devil's advocate?

C'mon now: "to see reality", "not proposing to make it easier to fire people".

Why can't the working class demand changes and influence the reality?

Coming from a contractor... yeah, really...?

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