[HN Gopher] GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
___________________________________________________________________
GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices
Author : pbnjay
Score : 481 points
Date : 2023-02-09 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| tpmx wrote:
| Reminder: Nat Friedman is no longer the CEO of Github.
|
| 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 wrote:
| I mean doesn't the last sentence say it all?
| tpmx wrote:
| He's a German automotive industry person (Robert Bosch,
| Mercedes-Benz). I guess that's the kind of customers they'll
| be going for now, having won most software companies already.
| He's got a PhD in mechanical engineering.
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashtom
|
| I was just in the process of trying to convince a customer
| company to migrate from Bitbucket to Github. This (the
| information about the new CEO) makes me uncertain.
|
| I think it's safe to say there'll be an overwhelming
| "enterprise"/$LargeCo focus on their work, going forward.
|
| We can only hope that the UX isn't dragged down to
| stereotypical Microsoft levels in the process.
| vxNsr wrote:
| Wow what an odd coincidence both git companies doing layoffs on
| the same day.
|
| 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 wrote:
| I wonder if they were told to do X to match Microsoft and it
| took them a bit longer to implement.
| vinayan3 wrote:
| 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.
| adsteel_ wrote:
| Word of mouth is no layoffs in engineering this time.
| 0xmarcin wrote:
| If you divide outages / new feature then they are one of the
| best. Last few years they innovated like crazy. Opening VSCode
| straight from the repo is still my best feature. CoPilot hype
| is shadowed by chatGTP, but still it is one of their most
| impressing inventions. GitHub Actions, entire project
| management (although I still cannot choose colors for "sticky
| notes" in the project board). They where very innovative
| comparing to their competition e.g. GitLab.
|
| 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...
| swozey wrote:
| What do you like about GHA over Gitlab CI? I much, much
| prefer Gitlab. I've used both at companies for 5+ years. GHA
| are getting much better and the GHA Marketplace is a game
| changer. Gitlab needs that bad. But I find I have to be much
| more declarative with GHA (not using pre-mades) and get
| things done much more quickly with Gitlab.
|
| Gitlabs price increases over the years have been unpleasant
| though.
| [deleted]
| hankchinaski wrote:
| A good thing some company are going all in on remote. In the UK
| most companies are going back to requiring office presence
| Animats wrote:
| Does this mean we need to start migrating open source off GitHub?
| Will GitHub tighten up the restrictions on the free tier?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| 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".
| Salgat wrote:
| Sounds more like it's just easier to use favoritism that's not
| based on job performance when doing layoffs if you are face-to-
| face with these folks on a regular basis.
| onion2k wrote:
| _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"._
|
| This implies that companies that have offices keep people on in
| order to make sure every desk is being utilized.
| dinobones wrote:
| I think assuming that people will associate remote-only with
| layoff-eagerness is probably too pessimistic of a take.
|
| 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.
| jsdwarf wrote:
| Closing all offices enables GitHub to hire in cheaper
| geographies. Seems that the San Francisco headquarter was their
| only real office anyway,and I estimate approx 400 GitHubbers
| were working from there (55000 sqft office space, tech
| typically uses 150 sqft per employee). Gradually re-hiring
| those in cheaper geographies plus reduction of perks can mean
| quite significant savings and is another stab at Silicon
| Valley.
| bagels wrote:
| 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.
| moneywoes wrote:
| The bigger thing I think is offshoring
| killingtime74 wrote:
| As you said in your example having to say it to your face is
| not really a barrier to firing anyway. We are virtual servers
| to them, no matter rank or position.
| zztop44 wrote:
| My first instinct was that this model wouldn't work because
| employees need a lot more context/onboarding than servers.
|
| 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.
| MivLives wrote:
| Makes it easier to find a new job for the employee too if you
| can interview without leaving your desk.
| thefz wrote:
| > Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do
| more layoffs.
|
| I don't know. With sufficiently large organizations it's quite
| easy to lay off people you never crossed eyes with, remote or
| not.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| > 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 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.
| geuis wrote:
| 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.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| 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
| which to choose. Don't need to bother with those pesky things
| called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away
| can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.
|
| It's short term benefits for all, but ultimately the workers
| _will_ lose out.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| If that's the case then why hasn't the shift happened
| sooner?
| vlowther wrote:
| Covid pandemic proved that most office jobs can be done
| remotely with little to no loss of productivity.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| I would definitely argue a loss of productivity. But
| those costs are far outweighed by the benefits, such as
| less overhead, greater hiring radius, and flexibility.
| Plus a lot of the weaknesses are more managerial than
| technical, like synchronous vs async tasks and finding
| more effective ways to measure productivity.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Previous big waves of the shift were referred to as
| "outsourcing", "offshoring", etc.
| [deleted]
| cutenewt wrote:
| > they have a wider pool from which to choose
|
| This goes both ways for employer and employee
| uncletammy wrote:
| > 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.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your
| ass without breaking a sweat.
|
| But.. that's actually great? With more companies accepting
| remote work as just your average way of doing business
| means what _I_ can fire my boss too, without breaking a
| sweat. Because I would have ample opportunities to find
| another, similar, _remote_ work just easily. Oh, I don 't
| need to take the day off for the interview.
| vithlani wrote:
| [dead]
| simplicio wrote:
| 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 likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.
| laurels-marts wrote:
| >Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they
| have a lot of personal relationships
|
| That sounds like having a life. I guess the alternative
| is to isolate yourself to a point where you don't have
| any personal relationships. No hard choices then.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| idk I religiously firewall my work and personal life but
| still feel a lot of "personal work employment inertia":
| - I know that everyone doesn't suck to work with
| - I know who to ask for specific institutional knowledge,
| or to get something done through unofficial channels
| - I know who is more or less competent in specific
| domains - I know what kind of work people do and
| do not enjoy
|
| etc. It's actually the main reason I haven't done the
| whole salary optimization by job hopping thing, well that
| and the effort of hyping myself up into extroverted self-
| pimp mode
| matwood wrote:
| > you don't have any personal relationships.
|
| You mean work relationships?
|
| I have relationships outside work. Though, I'm fully
| remote and also have work relationships.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Or, just do some socializing outside of work.
| oblio wrote:
| People keep saying that.
|
| Humans don't work like that. Almost all meaningful
| relations are based on prolonged proximity.
| baridbelmedar wrote:
| This site is a bit: "4 Polacks, 6 opinions" -Frank Sobotka
| gorjusborg wrote:
| There are a bunch of different people reacting to a stressful
| change in economy and its effects on the job market. That's
| all.
|
| It may be 'easier' to fire people when you don't have to deal
| with their physical presence, but I doubt that factors much
| into the decision overall. My bet is that companies are
| battening down the hatches because they see strong headwinds
| economically (or are using other layoffs as an excuse to
| clean house).
|
| Good companies will retain good talent. They won't jettison
| their valued contributors just to have their competition
| scoop them up.
|
| The emphasis here is on _Good_. Bad companies likely will
| jettison many of their good employees, either by setting bad
| policies and having them opt out, or by firing them direction
| because they aren 't paying attention. Remote work is one of
| those factors that some companies are struggling to set
| policies for.
|
| Unfortunately, there are many 'bad' companies, and many
| people on HN work for them.
| rnk wrote:
| Some companies laying off, the common issue is the
| appearance of over-hiring like facebook. I know two small
| companies that are hiring, so what can you conclude?
| Nothing in general. I think it's mostly just following the
| herd.
| silvestrov wrote:
| It's difficult for a company to work well when 50% are in
| office and 50% are remote.
|
| If you can't get enough good employees in office, then it
| is smarter to go 100% remote as you now have an easier time
| hiring and working globally.
| serf wrote:
| >Which is it?
|
| I think it's fair to say that people would like to work
| remotely while also not being converted into a commoditized
| faceless resource; and I think that it's clear to anyone at
| the moment that we haven't quite worked all the kinks out of
| total remote work , yet.
|
| An ideal remote environment would be one where the human at
| the other end of the line is still remembered as being a
| human and cherished rather than just treated as a gig worker-
| drone.
| guhidalg wrote:
| 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.
| null_object wrote:
| [dead]
| thinkharderbro wrote:
| why can't it be both ways? neither of those things is
| absolutes. you can have shitty companies that want to treat
| employees like temporary resources and may use remote work to
| streamline the facilitation of that. you can also have
| companies that treat employees well and don't see the need to
| force them into the office unnecessarily. both can happen. we
| don't have to think about things singularly.
| jawerty wrote:
| This person does not represent HN. They can have their
| opinion.
| hikawaii wrote:
| The hackernews zeitgeist assumes all companies are run by
| saturday morning cartoon villains, despite being in an
| industry that is highly privileged at the expense of other
| possible businesses due to economic policy.
| bagels wrote:
| HN is not one person. Different people can have different
| opinions on this matter.
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Not to mention being remote and caring for employees are not
| mutually exclusive factors.
| bawolff wrote:
| Its almost as if all decisions have pros and cons, and there
| is no magic one viewpoint that captures all the consequences
| of such an action.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| The layoffs _are_ relevant context for how people are going
| to interpret the policy change though.
| brundolf wrote:
| There are different people on this website and they can have
| different opinions about things
| ss48 wrote:
| If people were the same, there would be not as much
| discussion on this forum.
| mlyle wrote:
| And we can even have somewhat contradictory opinions about
| things.
|
| E.g. the option for remote work is really nice for many and
| may be required to be viable in the future... but are we
| losing some fundamental part of teamwork by leaving the
| office? And does it really just make us more expendable?
| onlypositive wrote:
| [dead]
| FpUser wrote:
| >"but are we losing some fundamental part of teamwork by
| leaving the office? And does it really just make us more
| expendable?"
|
| I do not believe I am special in any way but I am remote
| since 2000 and while working with the clients I often
| work with teams. At no point I felt like I am loosing
| some "fundamental part". Maybe because work team is work
| team and nothing more. I do not consider work as a source
| of friends even though I have acquired couple this way.
| Mostly I have friends outside of work.
| TheSpiceIsLife wrote:
| That's right.
|
| _The HN Community_ isn 't.
|
| HN isn't a coherent whole with one voice.
|
| And, as a sibling comment pointed out, neither, typically,
| is any individual contributor. We can even change our
| opinions.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I know. It's almost like HN isn't a monolith and people reach
| for the "comment" button more often when they are critical
| than supportive.
| lozenge wrote:
| It's almost as if... employees want choice even within their
| company?
| karaterobot wrote:
| > 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".
|
| 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.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| _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 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).
| Ancalagon wrote:
| 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.
| Idk__Throwaway wrote:
| Why should a company be forced to continue to pay for
| employees they aren't in need of?
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Where did I say companies should be forced to pay for
| employees they don't need? I didn't say that.
|
| What I did say is that this is yet another move by
| business to pay you less and offer you less security for
| your labor - because let's be honest, that's what this
| is. Companies will go with the lowest bidder they think
| can get the job done. Do you really want to have a race
| to the bottom for the price of your labor?
|
| And for that matter, how do you think unions, tenure,
| weekends, 40 hr workweeks, PTO, sick leave, health
| benefits, and a whole other myriad of benefits for your
| labor came about? I guarantee you its certainly NOT
| because people in the past viewed their labor value as
| purely transactional to themselves and their employers.
|
| You as an employee have far more to lose.
| seydor wrote:
| Online employees OTOH are easier to organize, unionize, make a
| fuss when having massive layoffs etc. Hard for companies to
| hide their digital footprints as well
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| disagree. if you're remote then i can find someone else on
| the other coast, in georgia or alabama, or india, who will do
| your job, usually cheaper.
|
| if you're high-end FAANG tier talent, different story, but
| most of us are replaceable. that means most of you reading
| this -- and all of the recent layoffs just underscore that.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like
| virtual servers_
|
| We are all cattle, not pets.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _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"._
|
| 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.
| peoplearepeople wrote:
| Honestly I couldn't tell you what capacity I needed from my
| reports on a time horizon of even 1 month. Sure we do
| planning, but it's always wrong.
| auctoritas wrote:
| If software worked the way managers and business like to
| imagine it does - define requirements, build app, step away -
| then this model could work. But we all know that's almost
| never the case.
| matwood wrote:
| > It'll be interesting to see if more industries are able to
| adopt a similar model.
|
| If the US offered some sort universal healthcare this would
| be much easier to see happen. UH would also be a boon for
| small business.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do
| more layoffs.
|
| Particularly of the people responsible for managing physical
| offices.
| noodleman wrote:
| I doubt in office staff are more valued by companies than
| remote staff. If the company is moderately large then you will
| not be any more visible than a remote worker.
|
| I'd be surprised if we're not just figures on a spreadsheet to
| those high enough up.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| I assume this is due to synergies from using Windows instead of
| whatever.
| webology wrote:
| Here is some follow-up that's more than just my tweet.
|
| https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-laying-off-10-of-st...
| brycewray wrote:
| https://archive.is/QDerR
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Didnt MS want everyone back in office? I'm confused? Or do github
| employees now only have access to MS offices?
| chem83 wrote:
| This doesn't directly answer your question, but Microsoft is
| known for enforcing policies differently across its companies.
| For example, LinkedIn employees sharing an office and cafeteria
| with Microsoft employees don't have to pay for lunch when they
| badge in at the cashier, but Microsoft employees do pay.
| PeeMcGee wrote:
| > LinkedIn employees sharing an office and cafeteria with
| Microsoft employees don't have to pay for lunch when they
| badge in at the cashier, but Microsoft employees do pay.
|
| Yikes...
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Got it, different perks depending on (sub-)company. Thanks.
| mbostleman wrote:
| I'm really behind. I thought Github had no offices, no org chart,
| and full comp transparency. Was that a very early version during
| a bubble? There's probably a book I could read by now.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| GitLab?
| amelius wrote:
| They still have 1 job opening ...
|
| Couldn't they find someone internally?
| revskill wrote:
| For SEO purpose i think ?
| wojcikstefan wrote:
| 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.
| kerpotgh wrote:
| I think it's something to celebrate. It's the best case
| scenario when you're acquired by a megacorp.
| wojcikstefan wrote:
| Agreed!
| bink wrote:
| Is this GitHub acting independently or is it Microsoft
| informing them that they needed to lose 10% but they could do
| it on their own time frame?
| napsec wrote:
| Looking at the CEO's statement it seems the final layoffs
| aren't even finalized yet.
|
| > Unfortunately, this will include changes that will result
| in a reduction of GitHub's workforce by up to 10% through the
| end of FY23. A number of Hubbers will receive notifications
| today, others will follow as we are re-aligning the business
| through the end of FY23.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Wonder what teenagers these days think of when you call
| someone a "hubber"
| MikeTheGreat wrote:
| Urban Dictionary has a pile of different definitions,
| many of which are quite unique. [1] I'm curious if you're
| thinking of a particular one?
|
| [1]
| https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hubbers
| 40acres wrote:
| This is the exact same message Microsoft CEO said in his
| message. So yes MSFT is directing these layoffs.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| The fact they're closing all offices and switching to fully-
| remote suggests it was Github's decision. Microsoft doesn't
| seem pro WFH
| dafelst wrote:
| A bunch of my former co-workers at MSFT are working from
| home 100% of the time. Maybe it is a per organization
| thing.
| olivermuty wrote:
| Satya proudly announced WFH as a thing you could do
| around mid pandemic, then it was bastardized as it went
| down the orgs.
|
| Some are 100% wfh, vast majority is some arbitrary %.
| aaomidi wrote:
| GitHub has been remote first forever tho. Microsoft buying them
| can't change that without fundamentally breaking the teams.
| wojcikstefan wrote:
| I thought it was _GitLab_ which was remote-first (or should
| we say remote-only?). GitHub still seems to have offices and
| people going into them.
| willio58 wrote:
| Yeah I don't think github was remote-first when it started.
| holman wrote:
| Definitely was- we didn't have an office for the first
| few years. Picked up the first office in 2010, and it was
| a big component of work life since then (even though the
| numbers were primarily 2/3 remote throughout).
| willio58 wrote:
| Oh interesting! Thanks for clarifying. I knew there was
| an office like a decade ago but I guess I forgot how old
| Github is!
| electrondood wrote:
| 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.
| ushakov wrote:
| They even had a full-scale replica of the Oval Office there
|
| https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720...
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Uh wtf
|
| I want to have something more useful to say to contribute
| meaningfully here. But my brain segfaulted.
| harveywi wrote:
| They got angry when Trump was elected so they forked the
| Oval Office.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| The office was not there during my onboarding in 2018
| JW_00000 wrote:
| This is a photo from March 2016, while Trump was only
| elected in November 2016.
| ushakov wrote:
| [flagged]
| kmtrowbr wrote:
| On the seal: "melius simul quam solus" means: "better
| together than alone." On the scale of extravagant perks and
| celebrations of success it is a fairly minor and inexpensive
| one.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| wait... why?
|
| I would have assumed that tweet was a joke. Because... why?
| gtowey wrote:
| That oval office replica was the entrance to the office.
| The reason they gave publicly was that since it was
| people's first impression they wanted to make it grand. And
| since the admin employee was the first person to greet
| visitors, they felt it was the most important job in the
| office and wanted to give them a badass desk to do it from.
| splatzone wrote:
| This is the kind of needless extravagance that makes people
| cynical about the tech industry
| dntrkv wrote:
| That's not really extravagant. I'm assuming it's just a
| meeting/work room with an oval office theme. It's a very
| cheap imitation of the oval office. They would have had to
| buy a lot of the same furniture pieces either way. They
| just had some fun with it.
| ProfessorLayton wrote:
| I was at their offices back then too. They had and entire
| section of the office for printing custom t-shirts and an
| _animation room_ -- yes an actual room for 2D animation
| with the backlit light boxes for _paper_ animation. Also
| a fully decked out broadcasting room for streaming.
|
| They also had grab-and-go apple products on the walls,
| like mice, keyboards etc. (Memory is foggy on if they had
| bigger ticket apple products too).
| lanstin wrote:
| And that makes tech people realize some of these execs
| really believe their own BS.
| jahewson wrote:
| Wait until you hear about the Chrysler Building.
| MarcScott wrote:
| The dojo was cool, and the roof garden, plus the Western
| themed poker room and the Victorian drawing room with secret
| book cases that led to other rooms. It was the most
| extravegant place I ever visited, and as stated, it was
| almost empty.
|
| Still I got to have a couple of free beers and walk off with
| branded t-shirts, hoodies and even a baby-grow.
| ushakov wrote:
| There is no reason to have this. Imagine how many lives
| they could've improved if they just donated a chunk of the
| money that allowed them to have offices like this to
| charity
| roflyear wrote:
| You're right, absolutely. It's cool but the money they
| spent here is pretty ridiculous
| joewadcan wrote:
| 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.
| margorczynski wrote:
| Kinda shows that most people would choose remote and less
| commute over an office even as amazing as this one.
|
| 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.
| mi_lk wrote:
| What does closing all offices mean? Do they go full remote or
| employees are going to move to Microsoft offices
| bastardoperator wrote:
| It's always been fully remote
| rubenrails wrote:
| It means they're going full remote. From the article linked in
| the comments:
|
| > 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.
| shard_ wrote:
| GitHub was already fully remote since forever, and long before
| Covid. The offices were just there as an option for employees
| who happened to live nearby, and for occasional, in-person
| meetings, but I doubt there was a single person who worked
| there full time. This isn't big news for the majority of GitHub
| employees.
| lampshades wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| yamtaddle wrote:
| This is following some _insane_ hiring numbers the last three
| or so years, to a degree that I don 't think was present in the
| run-up to the last couple times (some, yes, but not this much).
|
| 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)
| willio58 wrote:
| It's really nothing to worry about for the average dev.
| Companies are taking this opportunity to cull the heard of the
| under-performers. Doing so at this time means they'll stir up
| less controversy since every tech company is doing the same.
|
| 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.
| slut wrote:
| 10% of the company is not underperformers. 10% of the company
| probably hasn't even worked there for a year.
|
| They like everyone else hired too fast and the free covid
| money boom is over.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| To be honest we're not yet .com bubble level. That saw many
| many _bankruptcies_ . It took microsoft ~17 yrs to go from it's
| .com bubble to breakeven, though others rebounded faster.
|
| 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...
| andrew_ wrote:
| Too many are missing this. Recruiting, marketing, and sales
| are getting run through. There's been a glut of recruiters in
| the industry for at least 10 years. Anecdotally I'm under the
| impression most are low-skill workers.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is a regular cycle. These companies will eventually
| overhire again, then they'll lay people off again. This has
| been the pattern in the industry for a very long time.
| potatolicious wrote:
| > _" I wonder how far into the year this will go and if we'll
| ever come back."_
|
| 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.
| 0xmarcin wrote:
| The invention of Radio, TV, Internet and Smartphone all have
| a property that they eventually reached even the most tech
| averse individuals. Crypto market is very limited as it
| requires technical (read nerdy) knowledge to do it right, or
| you will risk your money due to scam exchanges. But digital
| money is still a very good idea, Central Bank Digital
| Currency is a thing and I bet we will have you use in the
| future.
|
| AI has the property that it can reach all the people around
| the world. From AI that teaches you a foreign languages to
| automated advisors that can e.g. recommend a diet based on
| your needs or even AI dating where instead of sweeping AI
| will do the match (I would pay for the last option).
|
| The problem with AI is that there was already "AI winter":
| high expectation in the beginning, but nothing workable
| delivered in the end in the late 70s if I remember correctly.
| I hope it will not end up like this, this time.
|
| I also don't see much potential in metaverse. For one we are
| crazed about healthy lifestyle and siting with glasses to
| walk though some virtual landscape makes no sense to me. It
| will only make you weak and tired. For the second the tech is
| not there yet, we may fool our sense of vision and hearing,
| but we cannot fool our sense of orientation, neither our
| muscles.
| dehrmann wrote:
| This is nothing compared to 2000, or even 2008. You might have
| a point about offshoring. With tech workers insisting they're
| just as productive working from home, you might as well hire
| people in countries with cheaper homes.
| [deleted]
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| which is why America needs deflation, or deflationary
| pressures (such as devaluation of the dollar against foreign
| currencies expressed as local price inflation) .
| shaoonb wrote:
| Honest question: how can devaluing the dollar be
| deflationary?
| mathverse wrote:
| This is not the case. Companies have already done this and It
| did not really work. Sure a lot of junior positions were and
| will be outsourced but the "good" worker will always be paid
| accordingly. This is why you can see companies hiring in
| India and then bringing a lot of people to the US.
| vngzs wrote:
| The last few years were marked by a truly outrageous hiring
| spree fueled by near-zero interest rates and, by extension,
| tons of cheap VC money. Because of greed or mismanagement, tech
| companies over-hired during the pandemic expecting record
| growth to continue indefinitely. These layoffs are a sign that
| pandemic-era business growth plans were brittle, unable to
| tolerate even temporarily raised interest rates and the ceasing
| flow of cheap cash.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| Since you are 35 I guess you just missed the financial crisis
| in 2007. I can assure you that was WAY more intense than what
| we're seeing now. In fact what we're seeing now isn't an
| apocalypse of any sort. Basically a bunch of huge tech
| companies staffed up during the pandemic years and now a
| combination of high interest rates and a slowing (relative to
| expectations) economy is battering their stock price. So the
| activist investors push them to reign in costs (eg reduce
| headcount). It's what happens in mature industries. Meanwhile,
| headlines aside about big name tech companies laying people
| off, the general market for engineering talent is quite strong.
| Not the level of insanity we were seeing a year or two ago but
| stronger than I've ever seen (excepting 2021-22) in my entire
| career. The days of a senior engineer pulling in mid-to-
| high-6-figures in total comp from a FAANG (or FAANG adjacent)
| company are probably gone but that was never sustainable
| anyway.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| Yeah it's really annoying seeing so many people talk about
| this recession like it's catastrophic. They clearly were too
| young for the dotcom bubble, let alone 2008. Getting tired of
| everyone in their mid 20s to early 30s experiencing baby's
| first recession and thinking the world is ending.
| majewsky wrote:
| Well, everyone has a first recession. Same situation as
| https://xkcd.com/1053/
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Maybe the techcorrection back to the already lucrative
| prepandemic days.
| mbesto wrote:
| > I'm young (35) but I've never seen layoffs so continuous.
|
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It is all cyclical really. The last cycle was very long, but
| now it will go down again for a while and then later pick up
| again. I have kinda been expecting some sort of downturn for a
| while. Covid bit messed the time line, but now it seems to be
| happening with vengeance.
| petsormeat wrote:
| Imagine refreshing FuckedCompany.com manually (no browser
| capacity for async fetch yet) to see which lavish VC-funded
| money laundering scheme in South of Market would now have
| tumbleweeds blowing past the empty Aeron chairs. This was my
| everyday for over a year, until I got a public sector job and
| could stop the era's equivalent of doomscrolling.
|
| Yes, we came back. Nobody learned from the experience.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| You missed them by that (tiny-fingers-gap) much.
|
| 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.
| mquirion wrote:
| This is right. The dot-com crash was an absolute crash. Not
| "we're laying off 5-15% of our company." It was a lot of
| "This media darling that had an IPO after 2 years of
| operations no longer exists."
|
| In my social group of about 30 folks, I think at ~25 of us
| all experienced months of unemployment, at the least.
| ben7799 wrote:
| This, think companies going out of business left and right.
| Not 5-15% layoffs after the company doubled or tripled in
| size over 2-3 years.
|
| Almost no one I knew worked right through it without being
| impacted, and some people had huge impacts. I worked as a
| contractor for 2 years afterwards before getting back into
| a startup. I knew some people who were out of work 6 months
| or a year and came back with huge pay cuts.
|
| Tons of people I knew ended up with furniture and servers
| in their house they took when the company closed and
| management/investors didn't want any of it.
|
| I got a desk and a nice office chair that way.
| ghaff wrote:
| I was lucky enough to grab a new position through someone I
| knew fairly quickly. But, in the month it took for the
| company to actually extend an offer, I didn't have so much
| as a nibble from anyone else. And I definitely knew people
| who just got out of the industry.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| I was out of work for about 13 months, and it was
| miserable.
| acdha wrote:
| 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 have Aeron chairs but they
| needed a lot of IT workers as they moved more online. I'm
| curious how that'll go now where that process is much further
| along and things like cloud services have been soaking up
| geeneric demand.
| ben7799 wrote:
| 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.
| 015a wrote:
| Yeah; its really important to keep in mind that in the
| majority of these layoffs, these companies are still
| employing at or above the number of people they were in Dec
| 2019. This isn't a business model correction; this is a "free
| covid money" correction. Everything that is happening was
| predicted by economists the moment the government started
| writing billions in checks during 2020; the fact that its
| _only_ 10% in most cases, and hasn 't substantively spread
| beyond Tech and Finance, is actually extremely good news, not
| something to feel dread about.
| bombcar wrote:
| Yeah this is more of a downturn where successful companies
| are laying off a percentage- the dot com bust was thousands
| of companies just ceasing to exist overnight. Not really
| entirely comparable.
| [deleted]
| papito wrote:
| US unemployment is the lowest since the Moon landing in 1969.
|
| 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_.
| lolinder wrote:
| I would wager that you also had never seen such an insane tech
| hiring market as we did during the pandemic. I think it remains
| to be seen whether this is just a correction of the pandemic
| tech bubble or something more permanent.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Have to remember that this is happening when we're not even in
| a recession. I can't imagine what things will be like when that
| eventually happens.
| ylee wrote:
| I wrote the below in 2006.
| <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178846&cid=14824754>
|
| >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.
| theironhammer wrote:
| It's class war. The hedge funds see workers purely as a cost.
| They ignore the value workers create. This class war has been
| going on since Reagan and even before that (oil crisis early
| 70s). It's just only now spread to tech workers. See the chart
| here: www.epi.org/productivity
| mathverse wrote:
| Especially tech workers in the US were incredibly cocky not
| realizing they are the working class too. It was inevitable
| that we will all get hit because of that attitude.
| [deleted]
| roboben wrote:
| The worst part of this is that everyone at GitHub is now forced
| to use Microsoft Teams.
| kerpotgh wrote:
| Teams isn't that bad imo. It's no Google meet but it's decent
| enough. I prefer both of those over Zoom.
| bfrog wrote:
| Without a workable native linux client, sounds amazing
| ledauphin wrote:
| this is terrifying. for all the grief people give Slack, I've
| used both and I would seriously consider leaving a company that
| expected me to use Teams long term.
| ramesh31 wrote:
| You might change your mind if you saw the Slack bill. A
| medium size org is easily being charged over $1MM/year.
| gunshai wrote:
| Can someone give me the TLDR on why they hate teams so much?
|
| I suppose I work in an organization with few true "technical"
| folks, and everyone is under Microsoft licenses so it doesn't
| seem like that big of a deal.
|
| I've used both slack and teams. What am I really missing out
| on here?
| NegativeK wrote:
| I honestly don't understand the passionate opinions about
| chat/conference software. They're all doing the same thing
| in roughly the same way, and I don't have a computer that's
| ancient enough to really notice resource hogging.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > and I don't have a computer that's ancient enough to
| really notice resource hogging.
|
| Most likely you don't use a conference software bad
| enough.
|
| That being said, having useful search, a quick UI and
| actual availability shown is massively helpful. A great
| comms tool also makes inter-department chats easy and fun
| (for example via #random). Lastly, the amount of time
| wasted with "can you see my screen?"/"can you hear
| me?"/"Doesn't work for me, I'll restart <software>"
| varies vastly between tools. Having communication,
| including discovery and screen sharing, _just work_ makes
| things so much easier.
| dzikimarian wrote:
| * Call in 2 minutes, customer sent teams link. You tap it
| on your phone.
|
| * You expect to enter nickname and connect as a guest (my
| company doesn't use teams)
|
| * F.. u. Today we're going to log into Microsoft account.
| No option to abort.
|
| * Personal account doesn't work (bonus points if you
| already have private office 365 logged in and it defaults
| to this account, then takes you straight to the error or
| tells you after 2FA).
|
| * Kill app/reopen? 50% success rate.
|
| After a few times I figured out that best way is to nuke
| the app data the moment it shows you login screen. And got
| PTSD.
| gunshai wrote:
| Ahh walled garden effects. Ya that's annoying.
| gray_-_wolf wrote:
| > * F.. u. Today we're going to log into Microsoft
| account. No option to abort.
|
| Actually I found a solution for this (on android). Open
| the settings, apps, find teams app and force stop it.
| Then try to open the link again. You should get the guest
| prompt. Sometimes this needs to be repeated few times,
| but so far this approach works for me reliably.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| It really comes down to the details. If the little things
| don't get on your nerves and you just care about putting
| messages in a IRC-esque interface that everyone else can
| see then there's no difference. Here's a really high level
| tldr: Teams is annoying in dozens of small minor ways that
| are collectively very frustrating.
|
| For a more detailed take:
|
| Slack is far from perfect but Slack is generally clean,
| quick, simple and compact. Slack feels like a purpose built
| tool for chat. Even when they add stuff like huddles it
| never feels like the priority is anything but the chat.
| When they roll out updates that make typing or formatting
| jankier I find they often get a fix out quickly.
|
| Teams feels like it is doing a little bit of everything and
| is slower, wastes screen real estate, has poor UX all over
| and does a lot of things so-so to decent vs. one thing
| really well. Why is chat so different in a Teams/Chat vs a
| Teams/Teams/Channel? You can't even do the same markdown
| formatting in those places. And speaking of markdown, you
| can type a backtick around a string to monospace it like in
| slack but if it's at the end of your message it won't
| format it. You need a trailing space for it to kick in the
| formatter. Little details matter and a lack of attention to
| them as an organization makes bad UX and weird behavior
| leak into your software.
| wrs wrote:
| The whole concept of a "Team" encourages silos within the
| company. You can't just search for and join a channel to
| collaborate, you have to be invited to a team to even
| know the channel exists.
|
| If your company is large enough that a flat, open channel
| namespace is overwhelming, then you might think this is a
| feature, but I was at Walmart with tens of thousands of
| people in Slack and I didn't feel that way.
| partiallypro wrote:
| I have the complete opposite reaction; I don't like Slack now
| that I've used Teams and I had used Slack since the very
| early days. The only thing I hate about it is how it handles
| file sharing, to the point it will change file names of
| images and converts them to png files, which sort of defeats
| the purpose.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| /s?
| gaoshan wrote:
| We use Teams long term and would give quite a bit to be able
| to use Slack. At least it's a great tool to focus our
| negative energies on, lol.
| brmgb wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| > 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.
| goalieca wrote:
| Gsuite has the best collaborative editing.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| 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 which web app
| products feel just about the same as they did when they
| were sharepoint web apps.
| matwood wrote:
| > were sharepoint web apps
|
| ARE still sharepoint apps. At least that's how they feel.
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| Oh yeah for sure. I think I meant to say on-prem
| sharepoint web apps. Which were terrible. Just like
| SharePoint. SharePoint and every single one of its
| components really embodied everything wrong with
| Microsoft's culture. It was distilled awfulness, lack of
| attention to detail, terrible customer experience, awful
| UX and just insane architecture decisions that still
| impact 365 to this day. The SharePoint list limit that
| Teams hit when you added too many people to a team (since
| worked around or fixed) a couple years ago is a prime
| example.
| kqr wrote:
| I agree. I went on parental leave a couple of months ago but
| had I not I would have started using something other than
| Teams with my colleagues with no regard to what the official
| platform is.
|
| I don't get why upper management thinks they have anything to
| do with how I communicate with my colleagues. I can only
| assume they would want us to choose a platform that allows us
| to work effectively.
| extr wrote:
| You don't understand why company management would have a
| say in how work gets done?
| bogantech wrote:
| > I don't get why upper management thinks they have
| anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues. I
| can only assume they would want us to choose a platform
| that allows us to work effectively.
|
| Auditing and compliance.
| blincoln wrote:
| > I don't get why upper management thinks they have
| anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues.
|
| The organization has to pay for whatever commercial
| offerings their teams are using, and any non-commercial
| offerings are likely to either expose the organization's
| information or at least put it out of reach of controls
| like legal holds. Use of some free/trial services for
| business purposes might also introduce legal/contractual
| liability that the organization is responsible for.
| oneplane wrote:
| Indeed, I'd rather use Discord than MS Teams if I wasn't
| allowed to use Slack. But in reality we'd probably get
| engineering departments just switching back to IRC and
| hastebin.
| rubyron wrote:
| Maybe the 10% quit over that, and they spun it as layoffs.
| meese712 wrote:
| Could be worse, could be Google Chat
| colpabar wrote:
| or wickr!
| Bjorkbat wrote:
| Call me crazy, but I think that it's premature to think that
| Microsoft's days of bungling acquisitions are over. They
| probably will manage to ruin Github, the catch being that it'll
| happen over a much longer timescale.
|
| 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.
| margorczynski wrote:
| For Microsoft I guess the next natural step would be some
| kind of project management software package like JIRA - well
| integrated with GitHub, Teams, etc.
|
| I'm not really sure how much more space for innovation there
| is when it comes to git web services. What kind of killer
| feature would trump GitHub?
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Dozens of comments about Slack vs Teams and not one person
| realized it's only being used to cut their Zoom bill:
|
| "We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of
| video conferencing"
| bleuchase wrote:
| They're keeping Slack. Zoom is going away.
| roboben wrote:
| Why don't they use Huddle then?
| can16358p wrote:
| I love Slack but Huddle is absolutely terrible. Extremely
| low audio quality with extreme latency (whereas I have
| superb quality and low latency on Meet and Zoom on same
| devices/connections).
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| It's gotten a lot better for me though latency may be a
| factor here. But I think it's fair to say it's still not
| as nice screenhero was in terms of quality and
| responsiveness. Which is weird because that's who they
| acqui-hired for creating huddles (well, presumably
| anyway).
| reidjs wrote:
| I've never had an issue with it, and found the video
| quality to be better than Meet, but about on par with
| zoom
| icambron wrote:
| I also get subpar audio latency from huddles. But I use
| it anyway because of how low-friction it is to start
| chatting with someone
| sleepybrett wrote:
| I dunno what is wrong with huddles but when i screenshare
| with huddle my cpu goes crazy. screensharing with zoom, no
| serious performance issue.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| huddle as a lot of limitations. it's good for random adhoc
| chats but not good for more formal scheduled meeting. for
| larger companies, using something zoom-like and huddle
| makes sense.
| roboben wrote:
| My company does not have many formal scheduled meetings.
| Mostly doing huddle to adhoc chat, discuss problems,
| screen share and pair program. It works well
| [deleted]
| ragebol wrote:
| Maybe they get annoyed enough to make it not annoying to use
| anymore. Putting it lightly..
| theowawayteams wrote:
| I used Skype 15y ago it's a great experience. Recently tried to
| install teams on Ubuntu it's absolutely shit show, so many url
| redirects and meaningless erros. Leaving skype as it's would
| have been a million times better
| gamblor956 wrote:
| At work I use Zoom, Slack, Teams, Google Meet and even Blue
| Jeans (due to dealing with multiple legal entities acquired
| over time that each use their own communications platform.)
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| __derek__ wrote:
| Sentiments like this should probably temper the ChatGPT/Bing
| hype.
| xpe wrote:
| Worse than losing your job?
| pvarangot wrote:
| I would consider taking a pay cut and moving to a cheap
| suburb and work for the government or a bank before working
| for a big tech company that uses Teams. I would only use
| Teams on a small group or some kind of very highly paid
| consultant gig.
| xpe wrote:
| What do you prefer, Slack? Something else?
|
| I find the whole premise of these kind of chat tools,
| combined with cultural patterns of using them, to feel like
| forced distraction.
| ghusto wrote:
| For sure. As somebody said already, at least if you're fired
| you'll get severance. I'd get nothing when I quit though.
|
| Have you _used_ MS Teams? I'm not exactly a fan of Slack, but
| it's like telepathy by comparison.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| [flagged]
| 2devnull wrote:
| I've always thought of zoom as the national socialist
| messaging app. Is it the sharepoint integration? That does
| seem a bit far left.
| xpe wrote:
| Please explain the relevance of your comment?
|
| Also, let's save the National Socialism comparisons for
| examples involving antisemitism, genocide, and
| authoritarianism. It is better to have dynamic range in our
| conversations, otherwise it all gets watered down.
| dan-0 wrote:
| Teams is horrible, but not nearly as horrible as an
| argument equating use of Teams to the Holocaust. There's a
| very big difference between using an app to communicate if
| you want your job and murder.
| dathinab wrote:
| oh have fun, I have to use it at work and it's a lot of trouble
| all the time no matter which platform you ran it on.
|
| 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.
| pwarner wrote:
| No one at Microsoft uses Teams, they just use email.
| agilob wrote:
| 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 related
| message and hope no one wrote any off-topic messages
| underneath. I often felt like Teams could replace unofficial
| documentation and most Confluence pages.
|
| 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.
| savanaly wrote:
| 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?
| krzyk wrote:
| Slack threads are hidden, it is clearly visible that they
| were added later.
|
| I prefer how they are handled in zulip.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Slacks threading model is super weak compared to other
| options. I haven't used teams, but I went from Zulip to
| Slack a little while ago and it felt like a huge step
| backwards.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| Zulip is in a league of its own, though - I'd say Slack
| is pretty similar to other non-Zulip options.
| krzyk wrote:
| Regarding threads I've seen two options (besides zulip
| state of the art handling of that). Either hide the
| threads like slack or throw them in your face like Cisco
| webex teams.
| c54 wrote:
| I think they're just saying that teams forces you into
| using a thread, and make a choice to create a new one if
| that's what you want. In slack by default you're writing a
| top level message (ie creating a new thread)
| brazzledazzle wrote:
| Pedantic perhaps but maybe it's worth pointing out that
| Teams doesn't _force_ you to use a thread. It just makes
| it the obvious choice since each top level message has a
| reply button directly on it so it 's a single step
| process. Also when we're talking about Teams there's a
| big distinction between a Teams/Teams/Channel vs a
| Teams/Chat which is its own annoyance. They don't even
| support the same formatting capabilities (e.g. markdown)
| which is weird.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Indeed, never underestimate the power of defaults.
| There's a tendency on HN to say "well, everyone should
| just use threads on Slack then." There is, of course, a
| way Slack could make that happen: make it the default.
|
| (For what it's worth, I much prefer Slack for
| communicating, but when I have to find something, I wish
| I were looking for it in Teams.)
| brookst wrote:
| I'm also confused because almost all of my company's Teams
| usage happens in unthreaded chats.
| ilyt wrote:
| We don't use teams feature almost at all because it
| forces threading. Before wer used mattermost but teams is
| 100% worse but with video chat...
| relaxing wrote:
| The unthreaded chats are all private, no? If you want to
| use the group chat it forces you into threaded (or is
| there a way to switch out of that?)
| SahAssar wrote:
| Are you talking about threads or channels? It sounds like
| you are describing what slack calls channels.
| relaxing wrote:
| Yes, in the places I've used Slack, channels were the
| default mode of communication.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| It has "private" group chats in Chats tab and all
| meetings auto-create group chats. At various points I've
| tried to push conversations into a proper Team and
| threaded chat, but the "convenience" of just sending a
| chat message in last week's meeting chat or some hand-
| built group chat rather than just finding the right Team
| channel seems to keep winning out more often than not.
| brookst wrote:
| In chat, just go to New Chat and add as many people as
| you want. Boom, unthreaded group chat. You can rename it
| to a topic or group name.
| relaxing wrote:
| But then what's the point of the "Teams" part of Teams?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > I'm also confused because almost all of my company's
| Teams usage happens in unthreaded chats.
|
| Yeah, having a feature doesn't mean people use the
| feature.
| terpimost wrote:
| If you guys really like threads I suggest to use Zulip which
| is open source thread based team chat
| make3 wrote:
| i think you're confusing slack and discord, everything is in
| threads in slack
| shp0ngle wrote:
| in my experience, the threads in Teams suck so much that
| everyone just moves chat to private groups that are still un-
| threaded.
|
| in my company, we moved from slack to teams, and EVERYTHING
| just moved to giant private chats.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Have you tried sending code snippets via Teams using
| ```-fenced code blocks?
|
| The result looks normal. But once the recipient tries to
| actually use the code, it breaks horribly, because Teams has
| a habit of sprinkling it with non-breaking spaces.
|
| This issue has been going on for years. I feel it makes Teams
| utterly unusable in software development teams.
| aliqot wrote:
| teams search is ass.
| nunez wrote:
| I'm with you. I only hate Teams because of how resource-
| intensive it is. It would be my preferred experience
| otherwise. Microsoft is seriously investing in it, and
| everyone uses it.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Slack has threads:
| https://slack.com/help/articles/115000769927-Use-threads-
| to-...
| dijit wrote:
| I tried Zulip with the rust community and it completely
| _ruined_ slacks "threads" for me.
|
| Its the equivalent between a pot noodle and a steak dinner.
|
| Zulip has a lot of other issues though, the app and on-
| boarding... but I really struggle to enjoy slack now.
|
| teams, however, is a total dumpster fire for serious
| communication outside of video meetings and some minor ad-
| hoc 1:1 interactions.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Crashing constantly and being a resource hog killed Slack
| for me.
|
| That and DMs being visible to whoever pays.
| alluro2 wrote:
| Teams, specifically on Mac and Linux, has been a shit-
| show of instability, weird one-off behavior, blank
| screens on start, login loops etc for my team. With how
| amazingly well Microsoft did with Visual Studio Code,
| it's a bummer how it seems that none of that expertise
| can be translated to other teams (in this case, the Teams
| one) as well...
| radicalbyte wrote:
| Teams crashes my 5950x in video calls. Otherwise no
| issues but I can't claim to have used it much.
|
| Discord is by far the best of the bunch combined with
| Jitsi.
| dathinab wrote:
| I agree that Slack chat is pretty bad for "technical" (or
| other detailed) discussions and in my experience the video
| chat is more likely to not work well.
| ghshephard wrote:
| I'm guessing you have a different experience with slack than
| I have - because important channels are frequently set to
| "Alert" - it's _extraordinarily_ bad behavior (to the point
| at which you are chastised and coached by your manager) - to
| ever respond to a message in a channel without threading. We
| have a broad array of "THREAD-PLEASE" Emoji's that you get
| hit with in the first week or two when you onboard if you do
| that.
|
| We've taken it next level here - whenever there is an
| incident - not only don't you respond as a message in the
| channel, you get a _new channel_ (created by a Bot when IMOC
| declares an incident) per incident, so all of the activity
| for that incident is self-contained (can be many, many
| thousands of messages) - and, of course, even in that split
| out channel (which is only talking about a single incident) -
| even there you need to respond on threads, never as a new
| message.
| yread wrote:
| Teams is not so bad. People only use it if there is no other
| way and no one is sending animated stuff or memes on it..Much
| better than Slack in that regard
| iliekcomputers wrote:
| How is this the worst part lmao?
| nvr219 wrote:
| You've clearly never used Teams.
|
| But in all seriousness Teams is fine for chat and video.
| jonp888 wrote:
| I didn't know it did anything apart from Chat and Video.
| Perhaps that's why I don't have any problem with it.
|
| What am I missing?
| roboben wrote:
| I used it for two years next to WebEx and it is the worst
| of all. Not only UX is the worst (cannot have a normal
| channel, everything is a thread, you cannot change
| alignment of messages) also the rate of people complaining
| their Teams does not work was staggering.
| isbjorn16 wrote:
| You can have a channel, of sorts. You add people to a
| giant group message and change the title.
|
| Voila. Channel. You need to know someone in the channel
| to add you _to_ the channel, but suddenly you can avoid
| that threaded bullshit.
|
| God I hate using teams
| flappyeagle wrote:
| If I were forced to use teams I would quit. At least if
| you're laid off you get serverance
| m348e912 wrote:
| >>If I were forced to use teams I would quit.
|
| It's funny to hear this because if I were looking for a job
| one of the selling points for me would be if they used
| teams.
|
| I'm on it all day, I present and run video meetings on it.
| I use it on different devices. It's not perfect by any
| means, but I'm confident that it will do what I need it to
| do.
|
| My only guess is you're on a linux desktop and you don't
| use an enterprise deployment of teams and perhaps you're
| using the web version of the client. In that case, yes I
| feel for you.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| I'm on an M1 macbook. Teams is extremely bad. I don't
| know how to describe it tersely other than everything
| kinda sucks. I work remotely and take a lot of meeting,
| so it's like my office in a way... an office that's
| cramped, leaky, ugly, uncomfortable, and cold.
| xur17 wrote:
| > My only guess is you're on a linux desktop and you
| don't use an enterprise deployment of teams
|
| Is there an enterprise deployment of teams that makes it
| not suck on linux?
| markeibes wrote:
| I use it on an M1 Max Macbook Pro and it's the worst
| piece of software on it.
| blincoln wrote:
| I use enterprise Teams on a Windows 10 laptop and it is
| the worst overall chat/conferencing experience for me in
| over 25 years of technical work.
|
| About the only thing I can say in its favour is that I've
| rarely had trouble with video or audio quality.
|
| It is an unbelievable performance hog. It launches
| something like 8-10 processes, one of which defaults to
| running at above normal priority. Despite this,
| frequently text chat messages will lag ~30 seconds
| between notification and appearing in the actual chat
| window. Even clicking on UI elements like buttons will
| often have a lag of 5-10 seconds. If I'm on a video call,
| it uses more CPU than any other process, including my
| browsers (~50 tabs open across ~10 windows) and a Kali
| Linux VM running in VMware Workstation.
|
| The UX is awful. For example, there is no way to
| permanently reorder the list of channels you're in (not
| even sorted alphabetically). It's always the order you
| joined them every time you start up Teams. My list of
| channels is something like 50 long, so I basically just
| have to search for the one I want, because the
| alternative is to scroll through the list and read every
| line.
|
| There are bizarre bugs. Sometimes I'll join a video call,
| but it will be a "ghost call" where I can hear the
| participants, but there's no window for me to interact
| with, so all I can do is close Teams entirely and start
| over. Sometimes I won't be able to unmute myself, so
| everyone will wonder why I'm not responding. Today I saw
| a new one where random members of the call had their
| video feeds replaced with empty black space (no profile
| photo/letter).
|
| It's unbelievable to me that I could use IRC, MSN
| Messenger, and any number of other chat apps on a PC 20+
| years ago and get a snappy response time, and yet Teams
| still feels like it's mired in a swamp running on
| hardware that's something like 100x faster and with
| 20-50x the amount of RAM.
|
| Something like 15 years ago, I was troubleshooting a
| SharePoint issue and discovered that even though it was
| using a SQL Server database to store everything, instead
| of taking advantage of the power of a good database
| design and platform, all of the kind of object affected
| by the problem were stored as enormous XML blobs inside a
| single column, with SharePoint doing a SELECT * and then
| acting as its own terrible inner faux-database layer. I
| have to imagine that Teams is a similar "don't ask how
| the sausage is made" kind of situation, where MS
| basically shipped an early prototype instead of
| productionizing it.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > Today I saw a new one where random members of the call
| had their video feeds replaced with empty black space (no
| profile photo/letter).
|
| Oh yeah, this has been happening to us lately. Quitting
| Teams (not just disconnecting from video meeting) and
| restarting seems to restore.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| I use Teams on a relatively modern Intel MacBook Pro. My
| chief complaint is that it _murders_ my battery -- I
| barely get two hours when I 'm on Teams video calls. But
| there are other issues.
|
| For example, sometimes the window just disappears when
| it's in the background. When that happens I don't get any
| notifications, so unless I notice that Teams has bugged
| out I'll miss when someone tries to contact me. And
| recently, video has become weirdly bugged -- I see people
| twitch around like I'm watching a bad horror movie, and
| sometimes they flash red. No idea what that's about but I
| can't seem to fix it. It's not going to kill me but it's
| uncomfortable to watch.
|
| More minor, but search is a mess, and notifications
| aren't great.
|
| Other than that I guess it's OK.
| [deleted]
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Oh, it also plays poorly with virtual desktops (or
| whatever the feature is called on MacOS). If I switch
| from the desktop with the Teams window to another
| desktop, then cmd-tab back to Teams, it will switch the
| active application to Teams but won't switch back to the
| desktop with the actual Teams window. This is
| infuriating.
|
| It seems to have something to do with the fact that, when
| on a call, Teams is active in every desktop (with a
| stupid little video window). But it persists even when
| you're not on a call.
| jesuspiece wrote:
| They've always been remote first anyway, I wonder why waste the
| money
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Agreed. Probably worse than Teams is Azure, Windows, etc. While
| things have changed Microsoft would give grief to developers
| that wanted to run Linux and that was really into open source.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > The worst part of this is that everyone at GitHub is now
| forced to use Microsoft Teams.
|
| On the plus side it means that some people will welcome a
| layoff with severance.
| bmy78 wrote:
| Teams is the result of Microsoft taking a look at Slack and
| saying, how can we make this feel more like Excel?
| roboben wrote:
| Internal code name was Slack360
| [deleted]
| amarshall wrote:
| 365? Also can't tell if you're serious or joking.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The joke is that MS brands its online services as "365",
| but they have enough outages for people to say things
| along the lines of "more like Microsoft 360, amiright?"
| wincy wrote:
| We use this joke at work all the time, any time a
| Microsoft service is down we call it "Microsoft 359".
| It's the work equivalent of a dad joke.
| bialpio wrote:
| Huh, when I saw it first I read it more as: "360 is a
| full turn, so Slack360 just means same thing as Slack"
| roboben wrote:
| This is unintentionally funny
| [deleted]
| roboben wrote:
| Lol Im meant to joke about the Microsoft product naming
| and got it wrong which somehow makes it more funny (read
| the other comments why)
| graphe wrote:
| Because when you saw it you walked 360 degrees away
| lostmsu wrote:
| 360 is a full circle, e.g. you'd turn right back toward
| it.
| xbar wrote:
| Let me help you--that's the joke.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Au contraire: https://i.imgur.com/PS1Vb6p.gif
| peteradio wrote:
| 360 degrees away? Why don't you try this and see how far
| you get. Look at something now turn a full circle (360
| degrees) and start walking, become amazed that whatever
| you were looking at is now closer.
| albrewer wrote:
| As a teenager circa 2007, I would troll in World of
| Warcraft's Trade chat with a variant of this joke.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| I wish I could believe that Microsoft appreciates Excel that
| much. Excel is one of the most empowering applications ever
| written and the single greatest thing Microsoft has ever been
| involved with.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Credit where due, spreadsheet applications were already
| established AND bundled into suites by the time Microsoft
| got around to leveraging their market position to make
| Office the de facto standard. But, yeah, I owe most of my
| career to making real web apps out of badly designed, hard
| to use, vile to share, yet somehow better than nothing
| Excel workbooks. Even with all the modern trappings, and
| besides specific applications like Photoshop or CATIA, you
| could probably still run a company on just email and Excel,
| because people will make Excel do whatever they need, no
| matter how lumbering the monster becomes.
| twoodfin wrote:
| That undersells the innovation of Excel, which started
| out as a Macintosh exclusive before being ported to
| Windows.
|
| It was the first major spreadsheet to be GUI-based from
| the ground up. It didn't need Office bundling (which came
| much later) to dominate, it was by far the superior
| spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| > by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1
| era
|
| Quattro Pro is waiting outside the door. He says he'd
| like to have a word. ;-)
| mFixman wrote:
| It's still a pretty awful tool, and anybody who wondered
| what the 109 means in `subtotal(109, A:A)` thinks the same.
|
| Excel is so successful that competitors need to copy its
| bad parts.
| codethief wrote:
| > I wish I could believe that Microsoft appreciates Excel
| that much
|
| Yeah, I don't think they really appreciate the Excel pro
| scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
| ijustlovemath wrote:
| What most techies don't get about Excel is that people
| wouldn't build their businesses around it if it weren't _a
| really powerful abstraction_. Sure, a dev could set up a
| CRUD app, but then you need a dev, which is far outside the
| budget of most SMBs. Rather than Excel being the root of
| all evil, we should view it as the empowerment tool that it
| really is!
| twoodfin wrote:
| When SPJ of Haskell fame was working for Microsoft, he
| put together a fantastic presentation on this theme:
|
| https://www.lambdadays.org/static/upload/media/1616736415
| 929...
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Well, Excel does not come with a complete broken auth. MS
| posts stats of how horrible the Internet sec is and it is
| just that you mostly can't even use the service without going
| into auth hell.
| yohannparis wrote:
| I don't see where is that a problem? People who will be using
| Teams are people using Office 365 daily. Having a cohesive
| ecosystem makes complete sense. From a UX too.
| widowlark wrote:
| The problem is that its very top heavy and is not well
| done, has lots of UI bugs and really is a pain to work with
| axlee wrote:
| For meetings, calls, screensharing, and scheduling it's
| superior to Slack in every single way. Written experience
| is worse though. If only Slack spent a month writing a
| "Schedule a meeting with those people, and add the
| meeting with a link to everyone's calendar" feature, they
| would be on par.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| One reason Slack maybe doens't, is nobody actually
| chooses Teams over Slack because of feature set. They
| choose Teams over Slack because it's "good enough" and
| included with Office360 which they already have. Meeting
| Teams feature set may not actually get Slack any more
| customers at all.
| axlee wrote:
| We do use Teams and Slack, Teams for scheduled meetings
| and Slack for everything else, just because Slack's
| scheduling is non-existent while something great comes
| out of the box from Teams (and yes, also because we get
| it "for free" through O365, and wouldn't be paying for
| Zoom). We wouldn't have to deal with Teams if Slack upped
| their game.
| persedes wrote:
| On par won't be enough for slack though if teams
| comes"for free" with your existing office subscription.
| vikram2784 wrote:
| Totally agree. MS Teams is super agonizing to work with.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| The problem is that Teams is used by companies who have IT
| departments that do absolutely insane things like DELETE
| THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some sort of
| perverse, contrived "security" issue. These are the morons
| that Microsoft is selling to, and giving advice to as on
| how to configure it. So you wind up with a system that's
| almost worse than not having anything at all. Our
| Sharepoint installation was so bad, Microsoft was hired to
| come in and "relaunch" it. As far as I can tell, nothing
| has changed. Teams isn't necessarily evil, but it's a "code
| smell" about the corporate IT culture if that's what the
| company uses.
|
| I'm old enough to remember when Skype was really neat, and
| it's just another in a long, long line of grievances I'll
| hold against Microsoft till I die.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Companies love Microsoft because of how many footguns
| they have available in settings and in group policy
| configuration. The defaults for so many of the
| applications are actually remarkably nice, and then it is
| amazing how many IT departments see the massive list of
| settings and group policy configurations as a buffet of
| "security options" rather than a terrifying hall of
| footguns, because who needs feet or nice things.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Well said.
| jsnell wrote:
| > DELETE THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some
| sort of perverse, contrived "security" issue.
|
| Seems much more likely to be due to legal reasons than
| for security. If the chats are not retained, they can't
| be found in discovery. (And given chat is even more
| informal than email, people probably say a lot of things
| they shouldn't in chat).
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| Look, I fully understand the reason given, and, like
| government programs, it all sounds nice and looks good on
| paper, but we are simply NOT in that litigious a business
| space. And, frankly, simply deleting everything as we go
| seems like something that public safety laws should
| PREVENT, but I digress.
|
| Back to the "code smell" of the IT department... For
| instance, I opened a ticket for my new laptop for
| something that is not common, but it can be self-selected
| from the menu of requests to make, so it's not like it's
| a one-off. After THREE WEEKS of emails and chats and
| calls with NINE DIFFERENT PEOPLE, I found that we...
| STARTED COMPLETELY OVER. It would have been nice to be
| able to look back over the history to name and shame, and
| point people back to what had already been done, since,
| apparently whatever ticketing system they use is
| completely useless.
|
| So when even simple things take a month to do in your
| company, having, say, 30 days of history is not
| unreasonable. In fact, it's almost necessary.
| eschneider wrote:
| That seems like a more reasonable policy if you've ever
| had your email/chat logs subpoenaed. If that stuff's auto
| deleted, then it's easier to have open discussions there,
| but yeah, no history.
|
| It does change one's usage model.
| version_five wrote:
| It's not a cohesive ecosystem. Office + Zoom + Slack* is
| way more cohesive than Office + Teams. There are specific
| complaints, but overall one part of it is just the "tool
| that does one thing well" vs Frankenstein that tries to do
| everything idea
|
| *except I can't copy paste images from slack into office
| documents, this is a major hassle
| oneplane wrote:
| People who use Teams are people who have had it forced upon
| them. Make of that what you will.
| focom wrote:
| The worst about teams is that they still haven't implemented a
| corrected markdown editor. Its a pain to copy code into it
| rightbyte wrote:
| What is even worse is that when you copy code from it it
| might introduce no break spaces that wont show upp in a code
| diff but e.g. break your server config.
| bhaavan wrote:
| Gitlab and Github look like they are forked from the same branch.
| https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/gitlab-layoffs-company-to-cu...
| jamesgill wrote:
| git reset --hard
| ramesh31 wrote:
| git push -f
| kalnins wrote:
| git branch -D *
| pelasaco wrote:
| 'git blame!
| madduci wrote:
| [flagged]
| shagie wrote:
| If you're going to use that joke, use Copilot as that's a
| GitHub product.
|
| And it can't.
|
| And its a boring joke.
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| Except it can't. See:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648167
| Raed667 wrote:
| I'm so tired of this joke/take whatever it is ..
| [deleted]
| xpe wrote:
| This metaphor doesn't work for me. Source code is not analogous
| to organizational behavior.
|
| Not to mention it gives readers confused context about the
| link, which is about GitLab layoffs.
| drewcoo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law
| nfw2 wrote:
| It's not a metaphor...it's a joke
| proc0 wrote:
| Or maybe a prediction.
| pc86 wrote:
| Nope, just a joke.
| brookst wrote:
| git doesn't have branch prediction
| fragmede wrote:
| maybe with colab v3 or so.
| oneplane wrote:
| gpt-git might have branch prediction, but it might also
| have side-channel attacks
| 60secs wrote:
| make sure your git branch is set to protected
| roboben wrote:
| xpe is taking everything 100% serious here.
| mcast wrote:
| Their post sounds like a ChatGPT response
| xpe wrote:
| I have a sense of humor; the above was meh
|
| P.S. and that attempt at humor definitely involved metaphor
| eclipxe wrote:
| whoosh.
| jiocrag wrote:
| Fortune now confirming: https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-
| laying-off-10-of-st...
| trynewideas wrote:
| Another stupid demonym in a layoff letter!
|
| 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
| majewsky wrote:
| If you start the joke format, you have to commit to it.
|
| A Lattician, a Flexporter, ..., an eBayer and a Hubber walk
| into a bar. But in the end, they can't afford getting
| anything to drink since they've been laid off.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| https://archive.ph/QDerR
| mardifoufs wrote:
| >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
| ryanwinchester wrote:
| I worked at a company that used Teams for video conferencing
| and Slack for chat. The fact that they specifically said
| "Teams for video conferencing" reminded me of that.
|
| To be honest, it's not awful if you're only using it for
| that.
| corndoge wrote:
| Teams for video, not so bad. If they were replacing Slack
| with Teams, that would be horrible.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Surely they are just trying to gradually switch everything
| to Teams. Seems weird to use a slack clone for video chat
| only but continue to use slack for the chat.
| robryan wrote:
| Isn't it more the scheduling of meetings? Does slack have
| a reasonable way to schedule huddles and integrate them
| with calendars? My company does scheduled meetings on
| teams and everything else on slack.
| shagie wrote:
| > 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. This
| move will be complete by September 1, 2023. We will remain
| on Slack as our day-to-day collaboration tool.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| I really love when one brings in more tools. So let's use
| Slack for text, Teams for audio and Zoom for video.
|
| It's like most people forgot that in the early days there
| was a phone and it worked just perfect. Everyone was
| reachable through it. Now I need to check multiple
| channels for the same thing.
| [deleted]
| bhouston wrote:
| Teams isn't that bad overall compared to Slack these days.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Ugh. Being forced to use Microsoft products is worse than
| getting laid off tbh...
| seti0Cha wrote:
| I've never used Teams. Why does everybody hate it?
| adra wrote:
| The video is largely fine for my uses (last couple years
| it's come a long way), but the text platform is just so bad
| for me sitting with it and slack at my desk. Like night and
| day.
| bionade24 wrote:
| VSCode is often stated as the best-performing Electron
| software, Teams is at the opposite end.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Forcing people to use Teams wouldn't fly in a just world:
| it's a very cruel and unusual punishment.
| dsabanin wrote:
| That's very weird pairing indeed. Some people are definitely
| going to hate Teams just because of the context it was
| presented in.
| grepfru_it wrote:
| 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.
| umeshunni wrote:
| Moving from AWS to Azure is an order of orders of magnitude
| harder than moving from Zoom to Teams.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Are they using both AWS and Azure?
| patrakov wrote:
| But what's wrong with Teams? It works well enough for me in
| Firefox on Linux. But OK, I only joined customer-initiated
| meetings, and was never presenting, only watching and
| talking, so maybe never used some important but non-working
| feature.
| version_five wrote:
| I have a small business and I use teams - as part of
| office365 it's a fully featured video chat plus messaging
| tool. It would be redundant to also have slack and zoom
| (not sure what all github is consolidating into teams)
|
| But it also feels more cumbersome. With unlimited money I'd
| probably use slack and zoom instead. There are just so many
| little confusions, weird stuff where a team is has a
| sharepoint but it's not exactly a sharepoint, and it's
| never obvious where stuff is, and it defaults to opening
| office documents in some crippled teams-specific reader
| instead of their usual application. I know there's logic
| underneath it all, it just feels more clunky and enterprisy
| then the relatively seamless experience of other software.
|
| (Edit having just seen the parallel post to mine: the
| default email notifications are obscene. Getting an email
| because I didn't look at a message after one hour is super
| annoying, and is borderline "bullying" in a corporate
| environment. It's possible to turn it off, but the defaults
| suck)
| boomskats wrote:
| It is grossly inadequate when it comes to searching for and
| retrieving historical text conversations. For software
| developers, who depend on being able to search for a
| decision or mention or piece of code from a few weeks ago,
| it's downright unusable. Especially if they're used to
| Slack.
| ahepp wrote:
| It blows my mind the ways MS Teams finds new and creative
| ways to mangle and destroy my chat history.
|
| Just about the most important thing a business chat app
| could do, right?
| outworlder wrote:
| > and was never presenting
|
| Ah. There you go.
|
| It's even worse on non Apple silicon Macs. It doesn't seem
| to care that you have an I7.
|
| Zoom call quality is far superior and the client is less of
| a pig (if you don't use Team's web version).
|
| Now, for _text conversations_? Teams is borderline
| unusable. Given the option I 'd rather use IRC (Team search
| is horrible anyway). If you are used to Slack, it's
| horrible.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I think that teams is good for meeting scheduling and
| conferencing.
|
| For a primary communication channel, teams is terrible.
|
| As long as I can use an IRC inspired tool (slack, discord,
| irc) to chat, I'll tolerate teams as a virtual conference
| room.
| ilyt wrote:
| The code display is utter shit, no proper markdown support
| and teams (what other chats call "channels" forcing
| threading for one.
|
| Writing bots for it is also painful.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Four immediate difficulties:
|
| It will often silently log you out. Then, you're sending
| messages going into the ether, assuming you are
| communicating. Except you are not. You have a silent
| morning w/o any firedrills, until at 11am, you discover
| you're silently logged out and there was a small popup
| screen that is hidden asking you to log in again.
|
| You are on a Teams video call, and you cant seem to create
| another window on your phone to look at chats. Makes no
| sense.
|
| The real estate required for Teams is so huge. Slack is
| incredibly space-efficient but Teams is not. Much like MSN
| Messenger, a lot of the space seems like deadspace.
|
| Cant keep a great group chat by turning it into a channel.
| ccouzens wrote:
| Did video work in Firefox? They must have fixed that. I
| remember having to launch it in Chrome to join meetings.
|
| Maybe it wasn't specifically Teams, but screen sharing used
| to be a massive performance hit (MBP around the year 2019).
| I remember giving a demo, and a response from a keycloak
| container I was running locally timed out.
|
| It made it very awkward to copy and paste multiple messages
| in a chat.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| I've honestly never had any issues with it but our use case
| is pretty light so I'm not sure what other people are
| missing from it
| mardifoufs wrote:
| For me it's that notifications are so inconsistent that I
| can never rely on them. Sometimes I get them, but sometimes
| I don't even if I'm actively using my PC. On Windows the
| performance is ok, but it absolutely ruins my MacBook's
| battery even when using the ARM native version.
|
| Another thing is that I have to use Intune to use Teams on
| my phone. Now, I know that's a choice the IT department
| made, and my employer is to blame here. But at least Zoom
| and Slack don't even give them the option to mandate
| bundling literal spyware.
|
| I also dislike the concept of having teams and chats in
| separate places, with the two having a completely different
| flow of usage.
| m-ee wrote:
| -It regularly sends me notifications that there's new
| messages in threads I'm in. The new messages are from me
|
| -The phone dial in option doesn't exist when you call
| someone through teams. Only on scheduled meetings. My
| laptop has audio issues so I have to awkwardly decline
| calls and send a meeting invite to whoever was trying to
| reach me.
|
| -Sharing a file in the chat for a meeting puts it into some
| incomprehensible internal sharepoint structure that is tied
| to that specific meeting instance and is difficult to ever
| find again.
|
| -Switching from speaker to Bluetooth headphones on my phone
| regularly crashes or freezes the app.
|
| -Worst search feature I've ever seen for a messaging app.
| If I manage to find the right keyword it will take me
| directly to the message, but not show the rest of the
| thread the message was in. I have to use the date and
| scroll back up until I hit in in the regular view.
| ccouzens wrote:
| > -Sharing a file in the chat for a meeting puts it into
| some incomprehensible internal sharepoint structure that
| is tied to that specific meeting instance and is
| difficult to ever find again.
|
| And prevents you reusing file names. If you uploaded
| "image.png" or "notes.txt" to a "Team" (room) once, it
| will make it awkward if someone tries to upload another
| file with the same name in the future.
| tck42 wrote:
| Does it at least pick a good spot for it in Sharepoint? A
| bit off topic but at my last job we used the Webex -
| Sharepoint "integration" and it worked the same way but
| it would just prompt you for where to share it from in
| the folder structure, but from the root. Inevitably
| people would just create a folder and share it, but the
| default permissions on the folder would mean nobody had
| access to it but the sharer. So you'd add the people in
| the room (manually) and then when someone new joined the
| room you'd need to manually add them as well, every
| time... We were a little surprised that the integration
| wouldn't automatically grant access to anyone in the
| room.
|
| Terrible UX.
| ccouzens wrote:
| I think it was at least better than that. I don't
| remember having permission issues with uploaded files.
|
| It's been a while, so I can't remember exactly where it
| put them. But the directory structure had the room name
| in it. As a user I didn't get a choice where they went.
| gertlex wrote:
| On my (Android) phone: In order to use bluetooth
| headphones, I have to FIRST open the "join meeting"
| screen, connect the device (or turn off, then turn back
| on if I was already using it), then join.
|
| Only app that has this issue with bluetooth audio. WTF.
| mullen wrote:
| The thing that drives me crazy about Teams is that I
| can't figure out how to start a quick meeting. Just a
| single button that is easy to find that when I click it,
| it just makes a meeting for me. Does not matter the team
| or organization, just make a meeting and let me copy the
| details to send to people.
| jontro wrote:
| Just checked, press the calendar and click meet now.
| afro88 wrote:
| Slowing down laptop refreshes is so short sighted. One of the
| cheapest productivity boosts you can give someone is a faster
| laptop. Better than hiring another dev to join a bloated
| team.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Laptops are not advancing that much yoy and a 3 year cycle
| is already aggressive.
|
| 4 years was the standard for a long time, these days many
| companies are moving to 5 or even 6 years for laptops.
|
| Hell right now I have employees at 4 years that refuse to
| change out their laptops because they have no problems with
| them and want to keep them longer
| throwanem wrote:
| Not half so much as leaving open the question of who gets cut
| through the balance of H1.
| romellem wrote:
| I'm not kidding, one of the reasons I left my last job was
| when our parent company forced Outlook, Sharepoint, and Teams
| on us (vs. Google mail, Google Drive, and Slack). That change
| on its own isn't the worst thing of course, there were other
| reasons why I was considering leaving, but it was definitely
| one of the last straws.
|
| Those MS solutions are just worse than the competition, and
| getting frustrated at your bugged technology because the
| parent company decides it can save some money is just trading
| employee satisfaction for dollars.
| ApolloFortyNine wrote:
| Gmail is so much better than outlook it's honestly insane.
| The way it handles email chains is infinitely better than
| outlooks, which often leads to responses just getting lost
| when someone replies all to a message that wasn't the most
| recent.
|
| Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this is 'our' fault, as
| I'm sure someone will point out. But in the years of using
| Gmail at my last employer, it just worked.
| rnk wrote:
| I love gmail, use it every day. But the chat in the paid
| corp version of email is so painful. I hate it with a
| passion. Gmail also now has the stupid left side bar
| where it doesn't show the gmail folders unless you click
| first. I wish gmail chat would just copy slack.
| albrewer wrote:
| > getting frustrated at your bugged technology because the
| parent company decides it can save some money
|
| It doesn't even save money - the cost is just shifted from
| subscription expenses to lower dev team productivity.
| Management can't measure the latter as easily as the
| former, and arguing against switching is a much more
| complex argument to understand than "this number is bigger
| than that one".
| galkk wrote:
| Outlook is more or less fine, but share point and teams are
| abominations
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I credit Outlook with the downfall of email as a defacto
| form of internet communication.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The calendar in Outlook is waaaay better than the Google
| one, though.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I want whatever you're smoking. Outlook is the poster
| child for overengineered software. It's the pointy end of
| Microsoft's attempt to make their software be all things
| to all IT department buyers' checklists.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| I don't know if its some crap in our top tier banking
| corporation's customization of Office 2016 suite, but
| outlook feels I am in Windows 95 era, running maybe some
| 486 DX2/66MHz machine with fabulous 8MB of RAM and loud
| clicky slow HDD.
|
| I click on email, it takes few seconds to render that few
| lines of text. I click on one below, same 3-5 seconds.
| Emails I read few mins ago. Click on Calendar, again 3-5
| seconds for switch. But then teams is same, effin' chat
| and nothing more, but also has proper UI bugs visible all
| the time, ie read stuff still has notifications. Having
| web call in it with screen share kills CPU for good. Our
| hardware is not the best currently but pretty recent and
| definitely things should be _smooth_.
|
| What is it, implemented in javascript?
| pugworthy wrote:
| I'm curious whether this approach to career/job selection
| is sustainable in a downturn. You can do this kind of "I
| quit because..." thing if you have many opportunities and
| options. But when things are tight? Good luck to you, as
| they say.
|
| One aspect of where I work (large old tech company) is that
| we value those that can adapt. You aren't judged as much by
| your skill set as you are by how you use your skills or
| work with the skills others have. Sure, there are limits
| and this doesn't mean you become the metaphorical frog in
| the slowly heating pot of water.
| noirbot wrote:
| They didn't say they'd never work somewhere with MS
| tools, just that that was part of the reason for leaving.
| I totally get it. If your employer is telling you a major
| part of your job is communication and giving you bad
| communication tools it's like if you got hired to be a
| chef and were given a camping stove.
|
| There's certainly folks who enjoy the challenge or
| adaptation, but it does show a certain attitude towards
| the work and workers if your management doesn't think you
| need good tools to do the job well.
|
| I'd stick around in a bad job if I thought I couldn't get
| something better, but it definitely means I'm looking to
| leave when things recover.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| non-paywall https://archive.is/QDerR
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| https://archive.is/QDerR
| mathverse wrote:
| I am absolutely certain this is to suppress wages and employee
| rights. It is a coordinated effort across the industry and should
| be immediately investigated.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Nah. These are all dumb companies which people shouldn't have
| joined in the first place. You won't find companies like Valve
| doing this. Join a good company people, instead of dumb, boring
| ones run by another run of the mill CEO.
| okdood64 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on Valve? Why would Valve not do this? What
| makes it different?
| cacois wrote:
| Not that I agree with the above comment, but Valve is a
| private company. Hence, they would not be beholden to
| shareholder pressures. Perhaps the argument the posted
| intended was to never join a pubic company?
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Hence, they would not be beholden to shareholder
| pressures.
|
| Private companies have shareholders & related
| interests/pressure as well.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| True, but Gabe Newell owns over 50% of Valve so I'm
| guessing the pressure in this case is more limited.
| sahila wrote:
| Even that wouldn't explain google and meta as the
| founders own over 50% of voting shares.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Cause it is a proper company run to solve problems and not
| make money out of selling vaporware. It also doesn't hire
| in bulk and has a culture which is a step away from all
| this madness.
| downrightmike wrote:
| Any time labor makes headway against Capital, Capital Revolts.
| Which is why we saw a lot of unionization in the past, it was
| the only way to make any headway.
| matwood wrote:
| No. They all knew they over hired and were simply waiting for
| the first one to make a move. And, if you look at the numbers
| relatively, these are barely a scratch with the numbers hired
| over the last few years.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Disagree. What we saw for the last 4-6 years was a 0% interest
| rate phenomenon. The bubble has popped, hiring as a measure of
| growth is over, and things are normalizing.
| pm90 wrote:
| It seems unlikely. Something as large as this would require a
| lot of secrecy to be a coordinated effort and not get leaked.
|
| Like a sibling comment said, its overwhelmingly more likely
| that we're seeing just how bad leadership really is at Tech.
| brink wrote:
| What evidence do you have if you're absolutely certain?
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Hence the need for an investigation. I don't think there is
| collusion, but I wouldn't be surprised.
|
| My conspiracy (let me put the tinfoil hat on) is that
| corporates and mega rich people wanted the recession badly
| because they can benefit from it. But it didn't happen so
| they're doing the layoffs and increasing prices to
| manufacture the recession despite their all-time high
| profits.
| it_citizen wrote:
| Genuine question. How would the mega rich benefit more from
| the recession than from a stable or high growth
| environment?
|
| Seems easier to capture a bigger piece of the pie when the
| pie is growing for everybody no and nobody complains?
|
| Not to mention the social and political unrest which might
| be triggered by a recession. Recent and old history has
| shown times and times again that it is when people go
| hungry or desperate that they challenge the established
| social order.
| willcipriano wrote:
| Wages lag growth, have a high growth environment for a
| few years and then cut off the faucet once people start
| demanding higher wages.
|
| It may not be a conspiracy but that is what's happening.
| [deleted]
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Two things contribute to why I think that:
|
| History taught me that the rich benefit from piece and
| from unrest.
|
| Knowing human greed and that it's always greener on the
| other side.
|
| But as I said, it's just a conspiracy theory that the
| recession is being manufactured.
| strangescript wrote:
| Tech companies know what some people are still pretending may
| or may not happen. The economy is going to get super rough this
| year and rates are not going to get cut any time soon.
| debacle wrote:
| The office closings or the layoffs?
| fullshark wrote:
| Was the pandemic hiring spree coordinated also? Just copycat
| behavior the whole way through imo.
| Ekaros wrote:
| In the end it is all about what stock markets expect and
| want. Before they wanted hiring, now they want layoffs. There
| is really no collusion.
|
| In general I think the true leadership of many of these
| companies is overstated. Layoffs are way to appear to save
| money so they are doing just that. And the pandemic seem to
| have been growth in remote products, so they had to grow for
| that. Even if most of the new workforce might not have been
| needed.
| dcchambers wrote:
| The whole experience the last few years has taught me a
| valuable lesson about how simple and reactive all of these
| tech companies are. No one really knows what they are doing.
| Other than a very few special people, most of the leaders at
| these major tech companies are not super-geniuses. They are
| human like the rest of us and subject to all that it means...
| Irrational, over-reactive, subject to the whims of the stock
| market, etc...
|
| I was a young kid during the dotcom bubble and in highschool
| during the '08 downturn so I wasn't really aware of the
| macroenomocic trends in the industry then, but now that I am
| older and deeply invested in the tech economy it's so
| obvious.
| chasely wrote:
| I find it freeing to know that no one really knows what
| they are doing. Looking into startup world from academia,
| it seemed like these people really were thoughtful and
| strategic in how they operated.
|
| After getting into a couple very well funded startups, and
| seeing how the sausage is made, you realize that no one
| knows what they are doing. It's not that they're stupid,
| just that business is hard and the environment is always
| changing. Sure there might be some "master of the universe"
| types, but you can create a good business solving the most
| immediate and pressing problems.
| matwood wrote:
| Getting someone to give you money for a product is
| _always_ hard. We see things all around us that we and
| others pay for every day, but that 's just survivorship
| bias. It doesn't stop many of us from thinking it's easy,
| "there's n-billion people on the internet, if I can get
| 1%..."
| flangola7 wrote:
| I'm not sure why anyone would think the people running
| these companies are any more intelligent than anyone else.
| In some intellect measures like emotional intelligence they
| are even often quite weak.
| webology wrote:
| It's mostly copycat behavior.
| https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-
| la...
|
| These companies are either setting all-time profit and
| revenue numbers or just missing last year's all-time records.
| Wall Street wasn't happy that they just missed their growth
| targets, but keep in mind that all growth is compounded. So
| they have never been more profitable, and yet here we are.
| mcast wrote:
| ZIRP allowed companies to borrow infinite money at almost no
| cost
| tchalla wrote:
| Oh great another obscure abbreviation to think about.
| roflyear wrote:
| What mechanism allowed that? From what I recall corporate
| bond rates were low but not no cost low. Bank rates maybe
| were like a few percent but infinity money?
| h1srf wrote:
| If you were MSFT or AAPL, you could issue 0%(or close to
| it) bonds and investors would lap it up. IIRC AAPL did
| issue a 0% bond at some point in the last few years.
| pydry wrote:
| Why would you assume that when companies compete fiercely
| that they are coordinating? Of course they werent
| coordinating.
|
| Whataboutism is a word that has been abused badly a lot in
| the last year but it seems like it fits here.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
| throwaway2214 wrote:
| "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained
| by stupidity."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| "Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately
| explained by malice"
|
| Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times it's
| a pattern.
| 1-more wrote:
| then nothing can ever be malice. This razor sucks.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| >This razor sucks.
|
| This razor does suck, and it's overused.
| majewsky wrote:
| No, but it means you should probably have specific evidence
| of malice before assuming it. It's similar to Occam's
| Razor: Just because "the simplest explanation is usually
| the best", does not mean that the simplest explanation is
| always right. But it's usually a good idea to start with
| the simpler explanation because a simpler theory is easier
| to interrogate.
| JoshCole wrote:
| It can, you just need to point out in what ways a thing is
| not adequately explained by stupidity.
| mshake2 wrote:
| Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and
| I'll have my wife's brother arrested.
|
| -Jared Vennett, The Big Short
| tullo_x86 wrote:
| Never has a phrase been so horribly exploited than by bad
| actors wishing to present themselves as innocent buffoons.
|
| Conversely: "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was
| convincing the world he didn't exist".
| roarcher wrote:
| Just look at the market since COVID. We're coming out of a
| bubble. When stocks go way up, companies get drunk on their
| newfound riches and spend excessively, just like individuals.
| Then times get leaner and they cut back. Only difference is
| that individuals aren't usually putting other people out of
| jobs when they do it, at least not directly.
|
| 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?
| tptacek wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you're allowed, as management, to notice what
| your competitors do and respond accordingly. It's, you know,
| the foundation of all price discovery. You just can't make
| actual agreements with them.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Exactly. It's the reason that the gas prices near me aren't
| $3.49/gal, $3.55/gal, and $12.49/gal.
| louwrentius wrote:
| I think you are right but this site is mostly for the
| "Temporary Embarrassed Milionaires" crowd that identify more
| with those large companies than with the average worker.
|
| 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.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Yeah that's bullshit. Came from a blue collar home, worked in
| the trades until I found my way into computers. Don't have a
| college education and carved myself out a nice career in tech
| being self taught and hustling for 20 years. From my
| perspective, this site is not for the "Temporary Embarrassed
| Millionaires," but unfortunately populated by too many from
| the "Sad I Missed The Bolshevik Revolution" crowd salivating
| whenever the opportunity to yell "You're oppressed brothers
| and sisters!" arises.
| louwrentius wrote:
| That's survivor bias: for you there are thousands who
| didn't make it for one reason or another and it seems that
| those are just to get fucked.
|
| 65%+ Americans don't have 500 bucks to their name. They are
| one car breakdown from deep shit.
|
| They call it the American Dream because you have to be
| asleep to believe it. -- George Carlin
| orangecat wrote:
| _65%+ Americans don 't have 500 bucks to their name. They
| are one car breakdown from deep shit._
|
| This is of course not true.
| h2odragon wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735
| [deleted]
| m1117 wrote:
| They're closing the offices so you can't find out who of your
| virtual colleagues is a chatGPT which they're going to replace
| you with.
| elforce002 wrote:
| 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.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Company loyalty was gone 20 years ago or more.
| mnd999 wrote:
| 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.
| mathgorges wrote:
| 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.
| mnd999 wrote:
| I also work with a lot devs starting out in their careers and
| I stand by my comment.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I fail to believe in this. They probably are going to need at
| least a small office or two. 99% remote - perhaps. 100% remote -
| highly unlikely.
| neogodless wrote:
| Posted about 25 minutes earlier:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735
| pastor_bob wrote:
| We just had a Support Ticket with them that took them over a
| month just to respond to, claiming they had too much volume!
|
| Surely, they're not 'overstaffed'
| ilyt wrote:
| You can have understaffed support dept while having overstaffed
| other dept. Why someone even needs to explain that to you ?
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Is this in addition to the 10,000 people Microsoft announced in
| it's layoffs 3-weeks ago?
| [deleted]
| lechacker wrote:
| Interesting about the offices. Is it because they are merging
| with MSFT even more or because they are embracing a remote-only
| philosophy?
| napsec wrote:
| That was my question as well. I wonder if they'll phase out the
| GitHub offices, then, after a time, force workers to RTO to
| existing MSFT offices.
| shard_ wrote:
| You're reading too much into the office closures. GitHub has
| basically always been fully remote and only a minority of
| employees have ever even seen one of the offices outside of
| occasional team meetups. Practically, all it means is that
| the employees who sometimes worked from the offices will have
| to find a co-working space or just work from home all the
| time.
| thrownaway561 wrote:
| from TFA "The company is also going fully remote, Dohmke
| wrote, telling staff they're "seeing very low utilization
| rates" in their offices."
| bfrog wrote:
| 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.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| 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.
| cacois wrote:
| Doesn't that mean they still pay for the real estate? I wonder
| how viable it is to keep that cost on the books for ad-hoc
| usage.
| Rafert wrote:
| They were locked into long term leases anyway:
| https://storeys.com/shopify-the-well-toronto-office-space-
| su...
| Raed667 wrote:
| Officies, especially the great ones (as in also very expensive)
| create an irrational emotional attachment and are very hard to
| downsize on them without impacting morale.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| It's disturbing to think that people think human connection
| is irrational. I guess y'all forgot that that was how labor
| unions were formed.
| karmasimida wrote:
| Office is where people used work, it is not a monument
| which I think many here seem to make it so
|
| If no one is working there anywhere it doesn't need to
| exist
| drusepth wrote:
| I'm not sure human connection is an equal comparison with
| offices. There's plenty of human connection, both in person
| and not, to be had with coworkers without centralized
| offices.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| It's not that the human connection is immoral, it's just
| that paying rent and heating for a pretty empty office
| space doesn't make much sense. As long as there is
| sufficient space for all the employees that want to go to
| the office, being against downsizing doesn't make much
| sense.
| cheriot wrote:
| human connection to a workplace is why unions formed? I
| thought it was the hours, dangerous working conditions, and
| unlivable pay.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Most of the history of labor unions involved meeting in
| secret in venues outside of work's control. Very few labor
| unions were ever formed in the halls of an office building.
|
| Also, human connnection isn't irrational, but expecting all
| or most of your human connections to come from your job may
| be.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| "Officies, especially the great ones (as in also very
| expensive) create an irrational emotional attachment "
|
| I was responding to that part. Office create a rational
| connection in an irrational setting.
|
| My grandfather and most of my great uncles were coal
| miners in Shamokin, Pennsylvania. They all talked about
| unions and striking in the mines. And they formed close
| bonds which made going on strike much easier as well as
| created a huge social bond when they where striking
| supplying each other with food and pirated coal.
| Raed667 wrote:
| Ok that might have been poorly worded on my end.
|
| The irrational attachment I was talking about is about
| having a large, status-symbol office with ~20% average
| occupancy. Downsizing to a smaller office harms morale
| even though most people work most of the time at home,
| yet they feel attached to almost always empty office,
| that's the irrational/sentimental part for me.
| microtherion wrote:
| Having recently spent a few weeks in large, quite nice, but
| nearly empty offices (because I wanted to work in office
| for a change, but most of my cow orkers had other plans), I
| realized that holding on to oversized offices can backfire,
| because as nice as the space is, it felt somewhat
| demoralizing after a while to be nearly alone in such a
| vast building.
| turdprincess wrote:
| It seems like the thing to do is to downsize offices
| until they correctly meet usage. So, take your number of
| employees, multiply by percentage that usually comes into
| the office, add a buffer for growth, and have an office
| for that.
| chris222 wrote:
| Not true! I worked at what some would consider one of the top
| offices (Dropbox). They went remote and the polling was
| something like 70% support 30% oppose. There were some vocal
| supporters of in-office (mostly due to the perks like food)
| but they gave a generous stipend instead to satisfy most
| people.
| tracker1 wrote:
| I find I work better in an office myself... been remote for
| about 3 years now, and I've gotten used to it. I miss lunch
| with coworkers, etc... and some of the more spontaneous
| discussions don't happen nearly as much... Also, I like a
| relatively short commute (around 30m) long enough to clear
| the mind before/after work.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Same.
|
| But I used to have a walking commute, which I also miss.
| Certainly I wouldn't miss a commute longer than 30
| minutes. And I'd probably miss it less if it were in an
| office park somewhere, rather than a city I could walk to
| lunch at various places.
|
| But yeah, I have a remote job because that's the job I
| have that I'm well-suited for that was available. (And
| sure, ability to work from one 1 or 2 days a week or as
| needed would certainly be convenient regardless). But I
| don't actually prefer working remotely, and also think
| there are real losses to quality of collaborative work,
| as well as quality of life. I know this is heretical to
| say these days in these circles.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Yea a lot of companies have done this to great effect - but I
| am curious to see what happens when lease renewal time comes.
| Paying for all that office space to remain ~empty 95% of the
| time does not look good on a budget.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| That seems alluring. I wonder how large of a percentage of
| employees would, if prompted directly, opt to have company
| funds directed to have "ports" in major cities, if it was
| entangled with their salary.
|
| 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?
| nidnogg wrote:
| Not me. Show me the money.
| makestuff wrote:
| As someone who goes in almost every day (I live close to my
| office and I enjoy getting out of the apartment). I wouldn't
| give up $600/mo for this, because management will never use
| that money for team events and travel. My team is spread out
| all across the country and we were told quarterly travel is
| no issue to all meetup in one of the cities that have an
| office. That went right out the door as soon as the economy
| went down. However, I can promise you that you wouldn't see
| that $600/mo back when you didn't get to travel.
|
| I think this will be the new version of "free lunch" that
| tech companies offer. Come work for X, we pay for quarterly
| travel to meetup with your remote coworkers!
| dweez wrote:
| That had been GitHub's model for their SF HQ office, more or
| less. Some local people used it as their daily office, but
| there seemed to always be a mini-summit or get together of
| remote folks happening each week.
| chadash wrote:
| What is needed is something like WeWork for large office
| gatherings. Something between a WeWork and a hotel conference
| center. The former is not really made for big meetings. The
| latter is either very expensive, too large or too small. You
| need a space for 10-200 people to meet and collaborate... not a
| conference center.
| TylerE wrote:
| A space for 100-200 people sounds a LOT like a hotel
| conference center. They are very flexible spaces.
| ecshafer wrote:
| Almost every hotel has some kind of conference center. You
| can absolutely rent a conference center for 10 people for a
| week in any city in america.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| and big conference centers are often highly booked and
| expensive; random hotels are often very cheap and easy to
| pull together with a couple of weeks notice. quality
| varies, but shop around.
|
| source: wrangled a few impromptu "conferences" at a local
| hotel near data centers.
| toraway1234 wrote:
| [dead]
| dcchambers wrote:
| We have done the same at Zendesk. We've reduced our office
| footprint but have kept our hubs open with large enough offices
| open for the occasional large on-site and for easier team
| collaborations, as well as space for anyone that prefers to
| work in an office environment.
|
| 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.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| [dead]
| ilyt wrote:
| Could rent it as co-working space on the rest of the days
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Could rent it as co-working space on the rest of the days
|
| Or just downsize the office to the point where utilization
| is high and rent out co-working space themselves during the
| "spikes".
| [deleted]
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It also makes sense as a hedge if the WFH trend fizzles out.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I'd be interested what the financial analysis looks like
| leasing or owning hubs vs a cadence of offsites annually
| remote first orgs usually hold, considering meeting space +
| hoteling for staff during the meet. I'll chip in for this
| analysis and blog post!
| WorldMaker wrote:
| That sounds like an interesting analysis, but I'm curious
| if this is one of those moments where economics around it
| will be deeply shifting over the next few years and any
| analysis will likely have to adjust frequently.
|
| For instance, even before the remote work shift in 2020
| many cities were heavily competing on conference and hotel
| space allocations for an interesting variety of economic
| reasons (tourism dollars that float alongside, for
| instance). As more "corporate Downtown" downsizes their
| office footprints to go more remote, some of that real
| estate inventory is going to go to apartments and condos,
| but also I would expect that there would be just as much
| pressure to convert it to hotels and conference space and
| WeWork-style hoteling office space.
|
| I wonder if that's going to snowball into dirt cheap
| conference prices in a growing list of cities. Especially
| if you start to factor in non-traditional "hub" cities
| (especially those non-traditional for tech). I've heard
| that's an appeal of Denver, Colorado as an annual onsite
| retreat city for remote first orgs as it has a large
| conference and hotel inventory that still has some very
| cheap periods outside of the usual tourist periods. I can
| point out that cities like Louisville, KY and Indianapolis,
| IN have massive inventories of hotel and conference (and
| exposition) space with some incredibly cheap calendar
| windows and still heavily competing among each other for
| more hotel/conference inventory every year. (I can also
| suggest which of those two cities in particular has better
| tourism options, but that may as much be hometown bias, so
| I'll save it.)
| csharpminor wrote:
| 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.
| whizzter wrote:
| Depends, already years ago there was a hub-n-spoke-like model
| for office buildings where you had smaller offices for
| smaller companies that had the ability to temporarily rent
| the larger "shared" areas of the building.
|
| It didn't really take off afaik, but with more bigger and
| stable tenants making a larger bulk of these it might
| actually take off a bit as a model.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Oh for sure it doesn't make any sense, and is driven solely
| by the inertia of already having the office space. You'd let
| it go over time as leases lapse until you're down to just a
| tiny amount that's facing high utilization.
| pkrotich wrote:
| This is where co-working space (WeWork?) would work well. I
| just signed a 3 months contract for my team to meet at co-
| working place as needed to kickstart a project which in
| person meeting is important.
| world2vec wrote:
| Gosh, I start to wonder if there will be enough jobs for
| everyone... :(
| 0000011111 wrote:
| 2,500 workers total so 250 will loose jobs.
|
| Best of luck to the folks who get cut finding something better!
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I hear the low roar of apartment prices tumbling down in SF.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| both git companies doing layoffs
|
| has atlassian done them too
| pabloski79 wrote:
| Which is the other than GitHub?
| CritterM72800 wrote:
| GitLab https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/gitlab-layoffs-
| company-to-cu...
| [deleted]
| Dopameaner wrote:
| An observation, Microsoft subsidiaries are being told to use
| teams.
|
| Cisco subsidiaries are being told to use webex in place of slack.
|
| We might be in a new world of chaos
| pm90 wrote:
| 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.
| johnbellone wrote:
| Why is this surprising?
| noirbot wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| And perhaps those companies having to eat their own shit will
| make them finally fix them.
| nimbius wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| bato wrote:
| Considering most of the new offerings are hosted on Azure, it
| makes sense they go down every time Azure does.
| hnarayanan wrote:
| Have you not seen the crazy increase in GitHub's offering? From
| the richer Projects systems to growing Actions and what not?
| hindsightbias wrote:
| The WFH productivity gain optimizations continue. I would have
| expected more than 10% given the gains claimed here.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| wild how so many companies are laying off 7-15% of their
| workforce in such quick succession
| tibbon wrote:
| 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!)
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| yeah, headcount numbers are still net increased. Just jarring
| to see so many layoff headlines
| sosodev wrote:
| This argument is so tired. It's not okay for every tech
| company to lay off 10% of their workforce. It does not matter
| that their headcount is still higher than it was a couple of
| years ago.
|
| This argument also completely ignores the fact that many of
| these companies, GitHub included, could afford to keep these
| employees around. When the industry goes on another hiring
| spree they'll hire them all back and more anyway.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > Many of these companies ballooned their hiring during
| covid, increasing at 20%-40% a year (or more!)
|
| Many of these companies grew their hiring at that same rate
| before Covid too. Only a few (zoom, peloton, etc) really
| changed behavior due to Covid, and for them it makes more
| sense.
| [deleted]
| sekai wrote:
| Will go back to hiring in a year or so, it's a cycle
| notatoad wrote:
| most of them haven't even stopped hiring. pay close attention
| to the layoff announcements to see which ones also announce a
| hiring freeze - most of them haven't. and i've heard of a few
| people getting offers from companies that have done mass
| layoffs in recent months.
| ilyt wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if they layed off "bottom 10%" in
| hopes of replacing them with better when the market for IT
| workforce is cheaper..
| raydev wrote:
| Nope, it's mostly random.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Also since everyone is "laying off their bottom 10%" and
| then rehiring from that pool thinking they're hiring the
| top 10%. Sounds like musical chairs. There's a old Joel
| Spolsky article on how everyone thinks they're always
| hiring the global maximum
| notatoad wrote:
| i'm sure there's some of this, but it doesn't seem like
| the broader trend.
|
| if they were really laying off the bottom 10% there
| wouldn't be so many stories of managers complaining about
| their direct reports being laid off without any advance
| warning. it's hard to pick out low performers in any sort
| of sane way if you're not even asking managers who their
| low performers are.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| 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%.
| electrondood wrote:
| 4 out of the last 5 market bottoms occurred about 1 month after
| "tech layoff" search frequency peaked.
| mountainriver wrote:
| That's good data, curious if this will be different with
| inflation
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| And there is no way the Fed can reduce rates to bail out this
| next crash. Hang on people...
| [deleted]
| throwaway290 wrote:
| 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.
| japhib wrote:
| this is pretty dumb, LLM isn't replacing any actual coders
| warkdarrior wrote:
| LLM isn't replacing any actual coders... yet!
| nequo wrote:
| That legal duty is at best questionable:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.#Signif.
| ..
| aerotwelve wrote:
| From Lynn Stout's "The Shareholder Value Myth"[1]; Stout is a
| former business law professor at Cornell:
|
| > "United States corporate law does not, and never has,
| required directors of public corporations to maximize either
| share price or shareholder wealth... State statutes similarly
| refuse to mandate shareholder primacy... As long as boards do
| not use their power to enrich themselves, the [business
| judgment rule] gives them a wide range of discretion to run
| public corporations with other goals in mind, including
| growing the firm, creating quality products, protecting
| employees, and serving the public interest. Chasing
| shareholder value is a managerial choice, not a legal
| requirement."
|
| Such firings will be because management _chose_ to make them,
| not because they were forced to by the threat of lawsuits by
| a non-existent legal doctrine.
|
| 1: https://www.amazon.com/Shareholder-Value-Myth-
| Shareholders-C...
| yieldcrv wrote:
| easier to blend in and avoid scrutiny
| wyldfire wrote:
| 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.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| But what's odd is Microsoft owns GitHub and already did a
| massive(ish) layoff. Why the separate ones?
| bjtitus wrote:
| Doesn't seem too odd. I believe LinkedIn wasn't affected by
| Microsoft's layoffs either.
|
| Here's an article describing how LinkedIn and GitHub are
| both managed separately from Microsoft:
| https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/26/four-years-after-being-
| acq...
| drstewart wrote:
| Wild to see cargo culting so obviously in action
| tpl wrote:
| Too bad, That SF Office was an excellent spot to visit for
| various meetups.
| dcchambers wrote:
| GitHub is definitely a thought-leader in the midsize tech company
| world. Lots of other companies aspire to be like them and look to
| them for guidance. I wonder if we will see other similar sized
| companies close their offices as well now.
| [deleted]
| nickpeterson wrote:
| Just wait till Microsoft starts charging a license for vs code
| and developers heads implode.
| Apreche wrote:
| Nah, I'd just stop using it and go to something else.
| proc0 wrote:
| I still use sublimeText which was gaining some traction
| before VScode took over.
| science4sail wrote:
| Fortunately I never left emacs.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| Emacs is forever.
| negative10xer wrote:
| at that point I'd just use vim in a terminal
| 6bb32646d83d wrote:
| It would be a huge bait and switch, but honestly I would most
| likely end up paying for it. I spend over 4 hours a day in
| VSCode, and it's better than everything else I've used
| Hackbraten wrote:
| I know, right? It even made me take up writing extensions as
| a hobby. Mostly linters and syntax highlighters for really
| exotic file formats.
| adverbly wrote:
| Hold on that could actually happen? It's not officially open
| source or anything?
| nickpeterson wrote:
| Pretty easy, just release new features as paid plugins that
| need subscriptions and make minimal updates to the core
| program.
| bombcar wrote:
| Just make it part of Microsoft365 and don't really bother
| updating the original. Done.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| The code is opensource, but not the ecosystem. Microsoft is
| maneuvering towards the same position as Android with respect
| to Google Play. Not technically mandatory, but so many
| conveniences are built on it that it may as well be for
| anyone not interested in investing a lot of time finding
| workarounds.
| ThaDood wrote:
| I think it is, but there is also a fork call VSCodium without
| the telemetry, I guess people could just pivot to that?
|
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
| horsawlarway wrote:
| No - it won't happen. The core editor is open source.
|
| At best, MS has some limitations around running some plugins
| (that they also develop) that require the licensed version of
| VSCode, rather than the OSS build.
|
| Most of those plugins either use MS servers (ex: Live Share)
| or use toolchains that MS is historically more closed with
| (their C++ toolchains).
|
| Generally speaking - you can use OSS Code today, without any
| issues. There's a flatpak here
| https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.visualstudio.code-oss
| and many distros package it as the default...
|
| I run arch and it's in the repos as simply "code" -
| https://archlinux.org/packages/?name=code
|
| I run this as my default everywhere, and it works a-ok. There
| is a small subset of devs that would likely feel some pain
| losing the closed extensions, but the total impact feels
| overblown to me.
| skee8383 wrote:
| i'll just go back to notepad++. although i must say it's been
| in decline for the past year or so. they removed a theme i
| liked to use and i don't care for the UI changes at all. But it
| is still functional, at least until the next downgrade from the
| developer.
|
| Eclipse is also still a great IDE with tons of plugins.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| The LSP stuff has actually unlocked a lot of fringe editor
| choices. Even new editors with tiny communities can provide a
| lot of IDE like features by just implementing the client side
| of the API.
| peoplearepeople wrote:
| vscode would be dropped like a stone
| mjhay wrote:
| It's nowhere near good enough that people will pay for it.
| IntelliJ it is not.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| No kidding if I have to pay for it I am going to pay for
| something that is _way_ better. I use it because it is free
| (me being a cheap fool) and better than eclipse.
| bhouston wrote:
| Not until there is a viable alternative.
|
| But with the integration of Github Co-Pilot, they can now
| make subscription fees from all of those users of VSCode.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I don't understand why anyone would use VSCode, now.
|
| Between Intellij, Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text there are at
| least 4 better Editors / IDE for any given language.
| scintill76 wrote:
| Due to JetBrains's (alleged?) links to Russia, their
| products are banned at some companies. :(
| albrewer wrote:
| Sublime Text was my go-to for a long time, and still is
| when I'm not working on a formal project.
| bogwog wrote:
| There's already a de-Microsofted fork called VSCodium. Most
| people would probably migrate there, and development will
| proceed independently.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| I've never used VsCode, so I'm pretty sure viable
| alternatives are around
| bhaney wrote:
| Viable alternatives to VSCode have been around since the
| 90s
| raydev wrote:
| The explosive success of VSCode reveals that this is not
| true.
| pojzon wrote:
| All those layoffs sound super bad of ppl in developed countries
| and super good for ppl in less developed countries.
|
| Im getting twice as much offers now and salary ranges double
| every few weeks.
| dangwhy wrote:
| when will these layoffs reflect in boom town housing markets ?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Already has, but I would not expect any pre 2020 prices unless
| the US has a complete meltdown. On the contrary, it seems like
| US is in an amazing position relative to other places in the
| world.
| burlesona wrote:
| SF Housing is already dropping, but unfortunately it's so
| expensive that even a substantial drop of 10-20% would still
| leave it as one of the most expensive markets in the country.
|
| The supply shortage is so severe that it would take a crushing
| local depression to balance out.
| sekai wrote:
| They won't. The impact of interest rates on home markets is too
| great for these tiny layoffs to be significant.
| jahewson wrote:
| It won't. Companies that overhired in lossy areas are still
| hiring in growth areas. This is a rebalancing, not a shrinking:
| demand for tech workers still far outstrips supply.
| outworlder wrote:
| Even if we assumed they are all moving away (they aren't,
| plenty of hiring still) it would take some time.
| dangwhy wrote:
| > plenty of hiring still
|
| Doesn't sound like it from responses the other ASK HN post.
| But you are right, i get a sense that it might take years
| before the havoc they've created will unravel.
| RedditKon wrote:
| Will they just be using Microsoft's offices?
| bastardoperator wrote:
| No, github has always been fully remote.
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