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GitHub to lay off 10% and close all offices

• h2odragon 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735
• vxNsr 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    I wonder if they were told to do X to match Microsoft and it took them a bit longer to implement.
• bediger4000 4y ago
  I assume this is due to synergies from using Windows instead of whatever.
• lampshades 4y ago
  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.
  • shadowgovt 4y ago
    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.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      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.
    • mquirion 4y ago
      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.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        I was out of work for about 13 months, and it was miserable.
      • ben7799 4y ago
        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.
    • 015a 4y ago
      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.
  • lolinder 4y ago
    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.
  • JohnFen 4y ago
    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.
  • dehrmann 4y ago
    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.
    • maerF0x0 4y ago
      which is why America needs deflation, or deflationary pressures (such as devaluation of the dollar against foreign currencies expressed as local price inflation) .
      • shaoonb 4y ago
        Honest question: how can devaluing the dollar be deflationary?
        • maerF0x0 4y ago
          The key is in the combination of words. > Devaluing the dollar against a foreign currency. Ok, so labour traded for global goods intermediated by cash means we can remove the intermediary and think about the just the work for goods trade. Imagine I work 1 hour for 10 loaves of bread. If I get more bread for my time, my value has inflated, if I get less bread for my time my value has deflated. Ok now lets add money to the picture. (please excuse unrealistic exchange rates and the lack of profit margins to help illustrate the point) If I work 1 hour for $20 and it currently buys $30 CAD and $30 CAD buys 10 loaves of Canadian bread, then we have the same scenario as describe before. The price of bread on the shelf in USA is $2 USD, or 6 minutes of my time. Now looks what happens when we devalue the USD... I work 1 hour for $20 and it buys $20 CAD (Less than before), and $20 CAD buys 6 2/3rds a loaf of bread. The price of a loaf of bread on the shelf is $3 USD ($20 USD/6.66) or 9 minutes of my labor. See how the price in USD went up? That's the deflation of a currency against another currency. And that's how US labor becomes "cheaper" because the rest of the world now gets 9 Minutes of your time for one loaf of bread.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • softwaredoug 4y ago
    Maybe the techcorrection back to the already lucrative prepandemic days.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    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.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • yamtaddle 4y ago
    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)
  • maerF0x0 4y ago
    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_ 4y ago
      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.
  • potatolicious 4y ago
    > "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 4y ago
      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.
  • vngzs 4y ago
    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.
  • papito 4y ago
    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.
  • willio58 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
  • theironhammer 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
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  • mbesto 4y ago
    > 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/2022-11/22/full/1669140051-3184.jpg?im=Resize,width=640 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.
  • spaceman_2020 4y ago
    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.
  • thinkharderdev 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Well, everyone has a first recession. Same situation as https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
      • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
        What recession? GDP is growing steadily and unemployment is at record lows.
      • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
        Technically 2020 was a recession. I guess we forgot already.
        • 4y ago
  • petsormeat 4y ago
    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.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • ylee 4y ago
    I wrote the below in 2006. <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178846&cid=14824754 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.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    The layoffs are mere fraction of the COVID era hiring. This is a minor correction.
  • tflinton 4y ago
    Eh, same thing happened in 2000's and 2010's... it's honestly about 3 years late.
• bhaavan 4y ago
  Gitlab and Github look like they are forked from the same branch. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/gitlab-layoffs-company-to-cut-7percent-of-staff-or-about-130-employees.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/gitlab-layoffs-company-to-cu...
  • xpe 4y ago
    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.
    • nfw2 4y ago
      It's not a metaphor...it's a joke
      • proc0 4y ago
        Or maybe a prediction.
        • brookst 4y ago
          git doesn't have branch prediction
          • fragmede 4y ago
            maybe with colab v3 or so.
            • oneplane 4y ago
              gpt-git might have branch prediction, but it might also have side-channel attacks
          • 60secs 4y ago
            make sure your git branch is set to protected
• jiocrag 4y ago
  Fortune now confirming: https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-laying-off-10-of-staff-and-cutting-down-office-space/ https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-laying-off-10-of-st...
  • mardifoufs 4y ago
    >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
    • patrakov 4y ago
      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.
      • ilyt 4y ago
        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.
      • Eji1700 4y ago
        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
      • m-ee 4y ago
        -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.
• tiffanyh 4y ago
  Is this in addition to the 10,000 people Microsoft announced in it's layoffs 3-weeks ago?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• dvngnt_ 4y ago
  both git companies doing layoffs has atlassian done them too
  • pabloski79 4y ago
    Which is the other than GitHub?
    • CritterM72800 4y ago
      GitLab https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/gitlab-layoffs-company-to-cut-7percent-of-staff-or-about-130-employees.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/gitlab-layoffs-company-to-cu...
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• jobs_throwaway 4y ago
  wild how so many companies are laying off 7-15% of their workforce in such quick succession
  • sekai 4y ago
    Will go back to hiring in a year or so, it's a cycle
    • notatoad 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          Nope, it's mostly random.
        • notatoad 4y ago
          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.
          • imbnwa 4y ago
            Seen 17-year Google vet get hit on Twitter, doubt they were a low performer
• deleted 4y ago
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• deleted 4y ago
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• webology 4y ago
  Here is some follow-up that's more than just my tweet. https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-laying-off-10-of-staff-and-cutting-down-office-space/ https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-laying-off-10-of-st...
  • brycewray 4y ago
    https://archive.is/QDerR https://archive.is/QDerR
• wojcikstefan 4y ago
  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.
  • aaomidi 4y ago
    GitHub has been remote first forever tho. Microsoft buying them can’t change that without fundamentally breaking the teams.
    • wojcikstefan 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Yeah I don't think github was remote-first when it started.
        • holman 4y ago
          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 ⅔ remote throughout).
          • willio58 4y ago
            Oh interesting! Thanks for clarifying. I knew there was an office like a decade ago but I guess I forgot how old Github is!
  • 4y ago
• electrondood 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    They even had a full-scale replica of the Oval Office there https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720?lang=en https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720...
    • kmtrowbr 4y ago
      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.
      • ushakov 4y ago
        The original seal said "United Meritocracy of GitHub", until they removed it after a backlash https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/#awesm=~otS2MwnaJJiJKB https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/#awesm=~otS2Mwn...
        • Aeolun 4y ago
          [flagged]
          • renewiltord 4y ago
            Oh, that was removed by the famous Julie Ann Horvath who made allegations of sexism and discrimination against Github (who hired an investigator and said they did not find grounds for the claims).
    • fnordpiglet 4y ago
      Uh wtf I want to have something more useful to say to contribute meaningfully here. But my brain segfaulted.
• roboben 4y ago
  The worst part of this is that everyone at GitHub is now forced to use Microsoft Teams.
  • xpe 4y ago
    Worse than losing your job?
    • encryptluks2 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • dang 4y ago
        We've asked you more than once before not to post flamebait comments to HN. If you keep doing it, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please don't post like this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • xpe 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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.
      • 2devnull 4y ago
        I’ve always thought of zoom as the national socialist messaging app. Is it the sharepoint integration? That does seem a bit far left.
    • ghusto 4y ago
• mathverse 4y ago
  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.
  • brink 4y ago
    What evidence do you have if you're absolutely certain?
    • Bilal_io 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
          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 4y ago
            [deleted]
• neogodless 4y ago
  Posted about 25 minutes earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735
• nickpeterson 4y ago
  Just wait till Microsoft starts charging a license for vs code and developers heads implode.
  • 6bb32646d83d 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      I know, right? It even made me take up writing extensions as a hobby. Mostly linters and syntax highlighters for really exotic file formats.
  • negative10xer 4y ago
    at that point I'd just use vim in a terminal
  • skee8383 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    vscode would be dropped like a stone
• dangwhy 4y ago
  when will these layoffs reflect in boom town housing markets ?
  • outworlder 4y ago
    Even if we assumed they are all moving away (they aren't, plenty of hiring still) it would take some time.
    • dangwhy 4y ago
      > 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.
  • burlesona 4y ago
    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.
    • erik_seaberg 4y ago
      It’s easy to forget that tech is only about 15%-ish of the Bay Area job market.
  • sekai 4y ago
    They won't. The impact of interest rates on home markets is too great for these tiny layoffs to be significant.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    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.
  • 4y ago
• Ancalagon 4y ago
  Didnt MS want everyone back in office? I'm confused? Or do github employees now only have access to MS offices?
  • chem83 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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 4y ago
      Got it, different perks depending on (sub-)company. Thanks.
• amelius 4y ago
  They still have 1 job opening ... Couldn't they find someone internally?
  • revskill 4y ago
    For SEO purpose i think ?
• lechacker 4y ago
  Interesting about the offices. Is it because they are merging with MSFT even more or because they are embracing a remote-only philosophy?
  • napsec 4y ago
    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.
    • thrownaway561 4y ago
      from TFA "The company is also going fully remote, Dohmke wrote, telling staff they’re “seeing very low utilization rates” in their offices."
    • shard_ 4y ago
      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.
• pastor_bob 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    You can have understaffed support dept while having overstaffed other dept. Why someone even needs to explain that to you ?
• Dopameaner 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
  • noirbot 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      And perhaps those companies having to eat their own shit will make them finally fix them.
      • userbinator 4y ago
        If all of Microsoft itself using Teams hasn't fixed the trivial problems with it after all this time, I don't think anything else will.
  • johnbellone 4y ago
    Why is this surprising?
    • Dopameaner 4y ago
      The surprising part of it is, it took so long to dogfood their products.
• mi_lk 4y ago
  What does closing all offices mean? Do they go full remote or employees are going to move to Microsoft offices
  • rubenrails 4y ago
    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_ 4y ago
    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.
  • bastardoperator 4y ago
    It's always been fully remote
• softwaredoug 4y ago
  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.
  • dcchambers 4y ago
    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.
    • frognumber 4y ago
      I suspect a pathway might be: 1) Open offices for collaboration 2) Shared offices for collaboration (like co-working spaces) with reservations, as well as off-site retreats to places like Hawaii. This is cheaper than leasing in big cities. 3) Cost-cutting during the next recession killing those fancy co-working spaces and retreats 4) Loss of team cohesion
    • ilyt 4y ago
      Could rent it as co-working space on the rest of the days
      • nordsieck 4y ago
        > 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 4y ago
        [deleted]
• vinayan3 4y ago
  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_ 4y ago
    Word of mouth is no layoffs in engineering this time.
  • 0xmarcin 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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.
• Animats 4y ago
  Does this mean we need to start migrating open source off GitHub? Will GitHub tighten up the restrictions on the free tier?
• tpmx 4y ago
  Reminder: Nat Friedman is no longer the CEO of Github. https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/03/github-gets-a-new-ceo/ 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 4y ago
    I mean doesn’t the last sentence say it all?
    • tpmx 4y ago
      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 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.
• RedditKon 4y ago
  Will they just be using Microsoft's offices?
  • bastardoperator 4y ago
    No, github has always been fully remote.
• nimbius 4y ago
  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 https://www.githubstatus.com/history just this year there have been 26 incidents. basically everything that could fail took a knee in just the first two months of this year. Last year was more than one hundred service impacting issues. Redmond captured the devs, but in the end much like Ballmers chanting its become a pretty meaningless acquisition.
  • hnarayanan 4y ago
    Have you not seen the crazy increase in GitHub's offering? From the richer Projects systems to growing Actions and what not?
    • alostpuppy 4y ago
      Right? It’s cool! I’ve been wondering if the drive there is stemming from Microsoft.
  • bato 4y ago
    Considering most of the new offerings are hosted on Azure, it makes sense they go down every time Azure does.
• hindsightbias 4y ago
  The WFH productivity gain optimizations continue. I would have expected more than 10% given the gains claimed here.
• tpl 4y ago
  Too bad, That SF Office was an excellent spot to visit for various meetups.
• world2vec 4y ago
  Gosh, I start to wonder if there will be enough jobs for everyone... :(
• hankchinaski 4y ago
  A good thing some company are going all in on remote. In the UK most companies are going back to requiring office presence
• bfrog 4y ago
  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.
• 0000011111 4y ago
  2,500 workers total so 250 will loose jobs. Best of luck to the folks who get cut finding something better!
• rossdavidh 4y ago
  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".
  • tibbydudeza 4y ago
    (WAAS) - work as a service - think contracting is more secure. Look at twitter and the current mess it is in - institutional knowledge has left the building and now there are all sorts of weird outages surfacing nearly every week like the early days of the 404 whale.
  • michaelcampbell 4y ago
    > 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 never thought of it that way, but it does makes sense. Companies will OPENLY espouse the "treat your employees like cattle, not pets" mantra (I assert many do that now, just not openly.)
  • dantyti 4y ago
    This is an interesting angle I haven't considered before. I've been working remotely for a few years now and I do agree that there are some issues there, like dedicating some of my personal space to work, the employer basically outsourcing office management to me and saving on rent, but the time savings and lack of distraction are definitely worth it for me. I guess the lack of personal contact and informal connections will also weaken any labor organizing efforts and might silo people off in a way that many won't even be aware that layoffs are happening, since there's no watering hole where people from different departments mingle and gossip. Nevertheless, it still beats spending 2 unpaid hours on a bus every day just to get to work.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• elforce002 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Company loyalty was gone 20 years ago or more.
• m1117 4y ago
  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.
• mnd999 4y ago
  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.
  • 999900000999 4y ago
    >And when you’re young you want to go for drinks after work and socialise with colleagues. And risk getting fired when you say something stupid. And force those with anxiety issues into forced socialization. What if you're disabled and have mobility issues ? Getting to an office everyday doesn't sound too fun.
    • mnd999 4y ago
      Don’t say something stupid. I’m guessing socialising isn’t for you and that’s fine, work from home. I’m not suggesting office is for all or for every day, but it should be an option for those that want to go.
  • mathgorges 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      I also work with a lot devs starting out in their careers and I stand by my comment.
  • Gigachad 4y ago
• qwerty456127 4y ago
  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.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  I hear the low roar of apartment prices tumbling down in SF.
• dcchambers 4y ago
  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.
• pojzon 4y ago
  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.
• mbostleman 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    GitLab?
• allochthon 4y ago
  A little depressing to see GitHub join the zeitgeist. Probably mandated from above by Microsoft. The next time I'm on a job search, I'll be de-prioritizing, and possibly even excluding, those tech companies that laid people off in order to signal to investors that they had their finances under control. I was kind of attached to GitHub, though, so this is disappointing.
  • mef 4y ago
    How can you be sure that investor signalling is their motivation?
    • quantumsequoia 4y ago
      As opposed to what alternative explanation?
  • kirso 4y ago
    Hey, there is always GitLab!
    • eqmvii 4y ago
      weren’t they yesterday?
    • ddejohn 4y ago
      GitLab also just announced layoffs: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/02/09/gitlab-news/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/02/09/gitlab-news/
• vram22 4y ago
  Seen on a related business networking site [1] a while ago: CFO to CEO: What if we train our employees, and they leave? CEO to CFO: What if we don't, and they stay? [1] LinkedIn.
• ecf 4y ago
  Layoffs will forever be in the shareholder playbook as long as the market still keeps reaffirming these decisions with stock price increases.
• Aeolun 4y ago
  Seriously WTF? I swear none of these companies were anywhere near a need for layoffs. Do they all just follow the trends?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• peoplearepeople 4y ago
  Closing all offices? That means remote-only right? Sounds like a great place to work once the layoffs are a distant memory
• rayiner 4y ago
  I’m surprised this isn’t happening up and down the line. All those law/consulting/accounting firms (where the culture assumes most people have private offices) are leasing enormous amounts of space that’s underutilized now because people are only in a couple or few times a week. With the economic belt tightening coming up it seems like a no brainer to start trying to end these leases.
• someonehere 4y ago
  Good
• lopkeny12ko 4y ago
  Embrace, extend, extinguish...
• fractalb 4y ago
  These layoffs are not part of the Microsoft's layoffs? It's in addition to the Microsoft layoffs announced last month?
• bradhe 4y ago
  Off topic but the “More Tweets” section under this tweet is just…full of trash memes.
• Shaggy2000 4y ago
  The World Economic Forum have stated in a white paper that Corporations and Governments will be expected as part of climate action to help move more people into cities. So that "15 minute cities" legislation can be implemented world wide. This appears to be nothing but a long term climate lockdown. I personally think that to have everyone working locally in these 15 minute zones in each major city and to have them never leave the zone would require that remote work is the norm beforehand. If people think that remote work equals freedom they are in for one hell of a shock.
• pelasaco 4y ago
  I was there in 2020/2021 and declined their offer. Too many distractions, the company didn't look like concentrated in the business but more in sjw activities. Being minority myself, I didn't feel comfortable having to go through some 3 hours diversity interview. I just wanted to work on github,not join a woke club.
• parano1d 4y ago
  What if Tech Companies can lay off people fairly risk free now, due to the statistical data gathered from remote work tools like Microsoft Teams? That activity data, makes it easier to distinguish between essential and non-essential workers, especially for larger companies.
• wolverine876 4y ago
  As I've mentioned, this is a perfect chance for new startups to thrive. The economy is doing well, and all these potential co-founders and employees are available simultaneously.