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 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".
I really liked Shopify's remote model of not closing offices, but turning them into "ports" for teams in major cities to get together throughout the year for planning, team building, and retreats. You had an official place to get together, enjoy the perks of tech company offices, but with the intention of deep short bursts of interaction rather than focused work.
My heart goes out to the laid off employees, though I think they'll be able to find solid jobs (or start their own companies) when they're ready.
What I'm more surprised by is:
1. GitHub operating so independently from Microsoft at large that they have their own layoffs (not included in the 10k people that Microsoft announced they'll be parting ways with).
2. GitHub operating SO INDEPENDENTLY that they can decide to go remote-first.
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.
I work in a role where help I ramp a lot of recent graduates into industry.
I can say this comment doesn't comport with my experience. The kids are alright.
One old practice that has helped a lot is pair programming. I employ strong-style pairing when I work with a new hire which helps them ramp up on our practices quickly IME.
A new practice which has helped immensely are in-person "burst weeks" every 3 months or so. It isn't the same as spontainiously grabbing drinks after work, but it definitely helps to build team camaraderie.
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)
I'm about to leave my job if they don't get enough office space for us. They downgraded to a coworking space with no monitors and not enough desks. I'll never take another fully remote job. 3 years remote at different companies and it's hell.
This really is the techpocalypse, huh? I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous. I wonder how far into the year this will go and if we’ll ever come back. Maybe companies truly will start offshoring.
GitHub has had so many outages in the last year. I can't imagine this is going to get better if they are going to lay off 10% of people. So many companies developer productivity relies on GitHub being up. I hope the remaining the folks who were not impacted can make large strides in increasing reliability of GitHub.
I generally agree, but it also does feel like just an extension of dogfooding. If you work for a company that has a product that solves a certain business need, it generally makes sense that you wouldn't hire a different company to solve that need.
Obviously in this case the reasonable response is that Teams and WebEx are worse products and MS and Cisco haven't shown much inclination to fixing that, but that's more the fault of the company's bad products more than anything about the internals.
I feel like this is a good argument to not allow mega mergers and consolidations. Github/LinkedIn etc could have both been operating as Public companies and not have to deal with this BS.
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is stepping down from his role on November 15 to become the Chairman Emeritus of the Microsoft-owned service. Thomas Dohmke, who only recently became GitHub’s chief product officer, will step into the CEO role.
With Friedman, who thanks to his developer and open source background brought a lot of community goodwill with him when he took the job, GitHub remained independent and platform-neutral during his three-year tenure.
The German-born Dohmke is probably best known as the co-founder and CEO of HockeyApp, which Microsoft acquired in 2015.
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.
In 2017 it was relatively empty... but the company filled it very quickly as it grew from 200 to 2000 people. So much so they leased out the building next door and tore down some walls to deal with capacity. Sad to hear it's being shut down that office is truly incredible.
I assumed that once a critical mass of other companies in this industry make these moves, investors expect this kind of cut from all of them. They'll presumably invest elsewhere if your company doesn't make this cut.
It doesn't appear that any of the big ones are completely reversing their hiring sprees from the past 3 years; rather they are re-adjusting in realizing that can't hit their profit targets at this rate, and that many of their ambitious projects aren't panning out.
Many of these companies ballooned their hiring during covid, increasing at 20%-40% a year (or more!)
Corporations all over the country have figured out that there's some fat to skim off the top, and give to the execs and investment banks, and they're all doing it at the same time so that they can't get singled out for criticism in the WSJ. It's bandwagoning for the absolute worst of all reasons, to the detriment of everyone else in the 99%.
Anyone made redundant by LLM who is not in a protected class will be fired, otherwise top management violates legal duty to maximize shareholder value.
Well, by this time is clear that company loyalty doesn't exist anymore.
I think a new market will rise up from this debacle: companies selling good & services with strong employee loyalty values. These companies will use this as a marketing hack to get the public (mostly middle class)on their side, just like the concept of "parallel economy" is getting people to choose companies aligned with their values.
A little depressing to see GitHub join the zeitgeist. Probably mandated from above by Microsoft. The next time I'm on a job search, I'll be de-prioritizing, and possibly even excluding, those tech companies that laid people off in order to signal to investors that they had their finances under control. I was kind of attached to GitHub, though, so this is disappointing.
I'm sure this will do wonders to all the broken features github keeps adding since being acquired.
At one point I stopped thinking about github because it Just Worked. These days its a dice roll if even simple things like loading a repo page or perusing the notifications actually does what its supposed to.
say what you will about the recession but since Microsoft picked it up, Github has taken an absolute shellacking. They couldnt figure out how to comply with US sanctions without alienating users, the ICE contract went over like a lead balloon, and the 2014 harassment case didnt help either but the most damning indictment is the uptime and performance.
just this year there have been 26 incidents. basically everything that could fail took a knee in just the first two months of this year.
Last year was more than one hundred service impacting issues. Redmond captured the devs, but in the end much like Ballmers chanting its become a pretty meaningless acquisition.
[+] [-] rossdavidh|3 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] softwaredoug|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wojcikstefan|3 years ago|reply
What I'm more surprised by is: 1. GitHub operating so independently from Microsoft at large that they have their own layoffs (not included in the 10k people that Microsoft announced they'll be parting ways with). 2. GitHub operating SO INDEPENDENTLY that they can decide to go remote-first.
[+] [-] bink|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaomidi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kerpotgh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiocrag|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnd999|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathgorges|3 years ago|reply
I can say this comment doesn't comport with my experience. The kids are alright.
One old practice that has helped a lot is pair programming. I employ strong-style pairing when I work with a new hire which helps them ramp up on our practices quickly IME.
A new practice which has helped immensely are in-person "burst weeks" every 3 months or so. It isn't the same as spontainiously grabbing drinks after work, but it definitely helps to build team camaraderie.
[+] [-] zeroonetwothree|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] Gigachad|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 999900000999|3 years ago|reply
And risk getting fired when you say something stupid. And force those with anxiety issues into forced socialization.
What if you're disabled and have mobility issues ? Getting to an office everyday doesn't sound too fun.
[+] [-] lampshades|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] webology|3 years ago|reply
https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-laying-off-10-of-st...
[+] [-] brycewray|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinayan3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dopameaner|3 years ago|reply
Cisco subsidiaries are being told to use webex in place of slack.
We might be in a new world of chaos
[+] [-] noirbot|3 years ago|reply
Obviously in this case the reasonable response is that Teams and WebEx are worse products and MS and Cisco haven't shown much inclination to fixing that, but that's more the fault of the company's bad products more than anything about the internals.
[+] [-] pm90|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnbellone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vxNsr|3 years ago|reply
Also interesting that GitHub is so separate from Microsoft that they are doing their own layoffs and weren’t included in the larger Microsoft layoffs.
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpmx|3 years ago|reply
https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/03/github-gets-a-new-ceo/
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is stepping down from his role on November 15 to become the Chairman Emeritus of the Microsoft-owned service. Thomas Dohmke, who only recently became GitHub’s chief product officer, will step into the CEO role.
With Friedman, who thanks to his developer and open source background brought a lot of community goodwill with him when he took the job, GitHub remained independent and platform-neutral during his three-year tenure.
The German-born Dohmke is probably best known as the co-founder and CEO of HockeyApp, which Microsoft acquired in 2015.
[+] [-] johnbellone|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electrondood|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joewadcan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ushakov|3 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720...
[+] [-] margorczynski|3 years ago|reply
For senior management + owners this is even better as with the remote-only approach suddenly they have global access to a much cheaper talent pool.
[+] [-] nickpeterson|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiffanyh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jobs_throwaway|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyldfire|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tibbon|3 years ago|reply
Many of these companies ballooned their hiring during covid, increasing at 20%-40% a year (or more!)
[+] [-] electrondood|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealDunkirk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sekai|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] yieldcrv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway290|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elforce002|3 years ago|reply
I think a new market will rise up from this debacle: companies selling good & services with strong employee loyalty values. These companies will use this as a marketing hack to get the public (mostly middle class)on their side, just like the concept of "parallel economy" is getting people to choose companies aligned with their values.
[+] [-] allochthon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kirso|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mef|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ancalagon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bfrog|3 years ago|reply
At one point I stopped thinking about github because it Just Worked. These days its a dice roll if even simple things like loading a repo page or perusing the notifications actually does what its supposed to.
[+] [-] nimbius|3 years ago|reply
https://www.githubstatus.com/history
just this year there have been 26 incidents. basically everything that could fail took a knee in just the first two months of this year.
Last year was more than one hundred service impacting issues. Redmond captured the devs, but in the end much like Ballmers chanting its become a pretty meaningless acquisition.
[+] [-] hnarayanan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bato|3 years ago|reply