GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices (opens in new tab)

Screen sharing, reminders about meetings are also better in Teams.

Ability to add people to "direct message channels" is definitely lacking in Slack. No I don't want to convert this chat with 3 people into a channel, FO. I want to add 3rd person.

Really should have seen that when Atom fell to the sidelines in favor of VS Code.

Admittedly though, I don't see myself using Gitlab anytime soon, if not indefinitely. What makes Github special, arguably, is that it looks less "businessy" and more fun and social.

Another reason why I think the ruination of Github will happen over a longer timescale. Any competitors will likely try to focus on trying to be different (i.e. Gitlab's focus on open source and dev ops) rather than try to focus on on what made Github special and do it better than Microsoft could ever hope to do.

EDIT: just to clarify, this comment relates because forcing teams to use products developed in-house erodes team culture. It's an attempt at assimilation.

One tip: Avoid the Linux version and use the chrome browser version instead. Wrt. most aspects the Linux version is the browser version but less updated and more buggy (no idea why tho, it's an electron app, it could be automatically always up to date/auto release a update every day/week).

Still even then there are funny bugs like we pretty much every week someone who has problem with a random teams bug, not specific or more often on any version/OS.

Like the chat icon randomly missing or screen sharing/video hanging for one person until they leave and re-enter the call.

And thats with the most minimal usage of Teams only for video calls, i.e. not chat and no fancy setting.

Oh and the Office365/Teams SSO is so inconsistent that it looks like a MITM attack from time to time, well except that a MITM attack probably would work more friction-less.

Teams is the perfect middleground: it's not particularly good at anything but it's not bad at anything either, and it can do everything.

Slack is as good for text-based communication as it is bad at video communications (we've never gotten Huddle working properly). Google Meet is adequate at video calls, but has suffered serious degradation in terms of functionality over the past year that makes us question Google's commitment to it going forward. Zoom is great for video meetings, doesn't do anything else. Blue Jeans is like Zoom, but expensive and it requires its own special hardware, but its buttery smooth and stable as a rock.

"We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing"

On the plus side it means that some people will welcome a layoff with severance.

Which is it?

As for the layoffs, I don't have anything to add to that. There a Microsoft decision.

A lot of people probably believe this is how companies think of employees. I know that at every company I've worked at, apart from losing a team mate you may like, it's just such an enormous pain in the ass to find, interview, onboard, and train up a new employee that nobody has ever thought of it as equivalent to spinning up and shutting off virtual servers. It costs a ton of money, too. I've never worked at a megacorp, and it may be different there, but I bet people would still rather keep people around if they can, even if only for purely selfish reasons.

Good.

Because that's the reality we live in. Acting personally surprised or offended or hurt when a business makes a business decision is not good for you. The sooner people accept and realise this the better.

(This message was bought to you by a contractor).

I would argue that companies already view their employees this way, in office or remote. Companies do not value employees. We are valued the same way you would value coal. If you need energy, keep buying and if not, stop.

That's basically how the movie industry has always worked. Why keep people on your books when you're not actively in production? It's one of those cases where organized labor seems to work out well for all sides. The unions provide talent and craft support when/where it's needed, then they go away when the work is done.

It'll be interesting to see if more industries are able to adopt a similar model. Similar incentives exist, but a company that makes software or hardware isn't an on-again, off-again concern like film production.

I don't know. With sufficiently large organizations it's quite easy to lay off people you never crossed eyes with, remote or not.

But then I thought about all the technology that was developed (docker, k8s, CI/CD) to make spinning up virtual servers painless.

I don’t love that my brain works this way, but I guess there’s a decent business in trying to build the analogous technology for “spinning up and shutting down” employees.

100% remote has become a requirement for me.

Even if that were the case, I'd still prefer to work for a remote-only job with a marginally higher chance of layoffs, than to work for an in-person job. The trade off still seems worth it to me.

You might enjoy reading The Age of Em. Imagine in 90 years you could literally spin up a copy of the em who wrote the code that's having issues, archived at a time with context full in mind, have them fix the issues or add some new related features, then spin them down again, with most funds probably going to the general clan of related ems.

I've been working remotely for a few years now and I do agree that there are some issues there, like dedicating some of my personal space to work, the employer basically outsourcing office management to me and saving on rent, but the time savings and lack of distraction are definitely worth it for me.

I guess the lack of personal contact and informal connections will also weaken any labor organizing efforts and might silo people off in a way that many won't even be aware that layoffs are happening, since there's no watering hole where people from different departments mingle and gossip.

Nevertheless, it still beats spending 2 unpaid hours on a bus every day just to get to work.

I personally enjoy working from the office. It was a better work environment and there was a clear boundary between work and personal life. The large amount of remote lovers representation on HN are outliers in the real world.

We are all cattle, not pets.

I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to those high enough up.

I never thought of it that way, but it does makes sense. Companies will OPENLY espouse the "treat your employees like cattle, not pets" mantra (I assert many do that now, just not openly.)

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 moving out of the Bay Area (worth it), and my manager said he's only ok with this because I'm a very active worker.

This implies that companies that have offices keep people on in order to make sure every desk is being utilized.

Particularly of the people responsible for managing physical offices.

Look at twitter and the current mess it is in - institutional knowledge has left the building and now there are all sorts of weird outages surfacing nearly every week like the early days of the 404 whale.

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

No! I won't have it. That's the proper realm of the contractor.

Also, remote work opens the door to replace expensive domestic workers with cheap foreign ones. If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less.

For what it's worth, this might finally open the eyes of many SWEs that they're plain workers with little bargaining power and that their inflated salaries are a historical accident owning to many of the current tech barons having been engineers themselves at one point, throwing a larger bone than they otherwise would have to. Other than that, there's few reasons, and certainly no market-based ones, why those salaries should be as high as they are, when they're cheap just across the border.

If remote work being granted and taken arbitrarily -- with not even an attempt at justifying it in terms of business demands -- hasn't alerted you to the feudal reality of the modern tech corporation, perhaps being laid off will do the trick.

Broad pro labour legislation would be the answer here, but while the libertarian crackpot religion remains strong in overclass circles, there's not going to be anything of the sort.

Why should I be required to employ you if you cost more than the value you produce? No one owes you anything. If you're so skilled, get another job elsewhere.

I'm just old enough to have witnessed the dot-com crash a few years before I went into industry; this feels very similar. In fact, it feels a little less intense; the dot-com crash was about an entire business model consolidating under an absolute handful of winners (example: most independent online stores went "We can't compete with Amazon" and bankrupted, laying off everyone) while this one seems to be a lot more "All these firms will continue to operate but they don't think they need to employ this many people to do it."

It will be interesting to see if the consequence is new startups competing with the incumbents as those laid off find each other and some capital or if the consequence will be something else.

We'll be back, but not until the industry discovers something of actual value.

My internal narrative of all of this is that many of us came up during the smartphone revolution which legitimately created a ton of new value. Products that could not exist before now could (and did!), resulting in a flurry of new companies, new products, and new ways of making money. This was the driving force during the past tech boom.

Then I think we started reaching the end of the smartphone boom. The industry needed to find some new technology that would similarly open a similar phase of rapid growth. It chose to bet on the gig economy, followed by crypto. Both of those were near-complete busts.

I think a lot of the pain we're experiencing is rooted in this. We're past the smartphone explosion but no real technology since then has actually unlocked a whole lot of new value, and in fact has burned investors badly.

Until we actually find this next-step technology things will be in the doldrums. Lots of people are betting on "AI" (or really just LLMs), and time will tell - I suspect it will be pretty transformative for some players and product areas but not in the industry-shaking way that is currently being hyped.

I have no doubt we'll find this at some point - after all technology continues to march forward, but I'm not convinced there is anything necessarily imminent that will drive the kind of growth smartphones did.

Go read up on the .com bubble popping.

The layoffs look huge because the increase in headcounts were so huge in the past 2 years:

https://bsmedia.business-standard.com/_media/bs/img/article/...

It's like saying "I lost a ton of weight recently! I'm down 20 lbs!" when you gained 50 lbs over the last 2 years.

>I moved from NYC to the Palo Alto area in May 2000. That's right, just one month after the start of the long stock-market collapse and two months after the NASDAQ's peak, although of course no one knew these things at the time. I thus got to experience both the highs (insane traffic on 101, Sand Hill Road absolutely packed for two hours each afternoon) and the lows (significantly-better traffic on 101--admittedly a good thing in and of itself--and hordes of people losing jobs and moving back home each month).

>It's important to distinguish between San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The Valley has recovered--traffic on 101 has long since become awful again, as today reminded me--but San Francisco still hasn't regained the equivalent of all those bubble-related jobs that vanished into the wind in the 2001-2002 time period, and probably never will. (I've been living in San Francisco for going on two years now and have yet to meet anyone who is working in a "Web" or "e-commerce" job up here. It's like a neutron bomb; the people went away but the buildings stayed.) By contrast, yes, the Valley lost tons of jobs, too, but at least the Valley had, and has, a longtime core of companies that made real products that do real thing dating back to the Fairchild/HP/Intel days. And on the Web side, of course, Google and Yahoo! are leading the charge. They're down there, though, and not up here. Unless and until another bubble develops, I expect San Francisco will remain a remarkably tech jobs-free (but with plenty of finance, retail, and other non tech-related companies) city on the edge of the world's greatest concentration of tech jobs.

Obviously I didn't know that there indeed soon would be another bubble in SF, this time a social media-driven one.

Also, if you're an engineer, keep in mind the org mix in layoffs. AFAIK It's more like the recruiter-pocalypse as companies do not foresee needing those headcount to increase headcount... Yes some engineers in the mix, but not a major component...

Yes, we came back. Nobody learned from the experience.

Github grips immense power and money. Just look at their position.

1. Owned by Microsoft but allowed to operate independently.

2. Microsoft owns VScode and now works closely with OpenAI, OpenAI is used for Copilot.

3. Created Copilot. For some this is not a big deal but for me in my tech stack it's been life changing. I save about 15-20% of my time by using it. This is an insane advancement that's only rivaled by ChatGPT for productivity (Another OpenAI project). Because Microsoft owns VScode, of course there's tight integration with Copilot there.

4. It's freaking Github, they house code for a huge portion of all code projects. 85% market share I think. They use the code to train copilot and whatever else.

Now you tell me why a company in this position had to lay off 10% of staff today. They didn't. They wanted to. That's fine, they're a company and sometimes culling the heard is the right thing to do. It just grinds my gears when companies act like it's what they needed to do. I'd rather they be honest and just say their true intentions.

There also hasn't been a large wave of companies failing outright.

This one doesn't seem anywhere near as dire, despite the large numbers flying around (at least, not yet)

We are not looking at some tech decimation. The companies were spending like drunken socialist sailors during the pandemic because the oracles in upper management saw us all staying home forever. And now they are snapping back to the sizes they actually were.

This has happened many times before and will continue to happen cyclically as long as people are free to spend their money how they see fit. Why would this particular time be the result of some vast conspiracy?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

The irony is that many of them are actually part of this layoff reading this and still they don't agree with what is really happening.

The inevitable periodic 'crash' that is part of the capitalist system is a feature, not a bug. It helps suppress wages, keeps workers in their place. So I think you are right on the money.

So many more layoffs will be announced in the coming weeks. But remember: all companies will show (record) healthy profits none the less.

Even the hacker news crowd that lives lavishly and is mostly unharmed by all of this should not feel save at all, you are just as expendable as the anonymous warehouse worker or fast food person.

Speaking of which, the 100K+ tech worker has more in common with the average fast food or retail worker than the owning class: you are worker slaves that fear for their well-being if without work.

Unfortunately I'm afraid the HN crowd is just too comfortable to realise that capitalism is destroying everything, from freedom and autonomy to democracy to the environment.

Like a sibling comment said, its overwhelmingly more likely that we’re seeing just how bad leadership really is at Tech.

Would you call the previous few decades of tech employers bidding comp insanely high as they competed for talent "a coordinated effort to boost wages?" Why not?

Many of these companies ballooned their hiring during covid, increasing at 20%-40% a year (or more!)

Layoffs and having to use teams? Talk about a morale hit

a Lattician, a Flexporter, a Scalien, a Relativian, a Plaid, a Swyftxer, an Elastician, a Krakenite, a Dragon, an Asana, a Wistian, a Nuron, a Bird, a Twilion, a Pitcher, an Olivian, a Snyker, a Panda, an Astronaut, a Superhuman, a VTEXer, a Klarnaut, a Lacer, a Mozillian, a Paddler, an Oyster, a SoundHounder, a Vimean, a Zoopligan, a Motive, a Stasher, a Plerker, a Lokaliser, a Courserian, a Udacian, a Racker, a Gitpodder, a Dutonian, a Googler, a HubSpotter, a Workmate, a Splunker, a Zoomie, an eBayer, and a Hubber

Eclipse is also still a great IDE with tons of plugins.

I like the model, but I question long term economic viability of owning that much office space with mostly low utilization and only occasional spikes.

Would you choose an additional 600$ a month and remote only, or would you vote for permanent variable spaces in major cities for events and team building?

https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720...

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.

The supply shortage is so severe that it would take a crushing local depression to balance out.

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.

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)

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.

Not to mention it gives readers confused context about the link, which is about GitLab layoffs.

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.

> The company is also going fully remote, Dohmke wrote, telling staff they’re “seeing very low utilization rates” in their offices. “We are not vacating offices immediately, but will move to close all of our offices as their leases end or as we are operationally able to do so,” Dohmke wrote.

Over this we have less visible feature like sec scanning that warns you when one of your secrets was actually made public. Or just old good dependency vulns scanning (too noisy for me).

That's why I find this very surprising, company that can innovate this much surely can make use of those people. Maybe this come from Microsoft headquarters, if MS layed off some people then all subsidiaries have to do the same? If so LinkedIn will be next...