7 ms·

Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

59 points by lawgimenez 3y ago

fidotron 3y ago
This trend for making workspaces ever more like cafes or bars was mystifying even pre covid, especially for offices in downtown locations.
- bombolo 3y ago
  My office is so dark… the building is central and it has narrow slits for windows. Being surrounded by taller buildings doesn't help. Of course in case a stray ray of sun manages to come almost close to get in, automatic curtains roll out. The walls are just grey cement, the floor is gray carpet (that statically charges you, as you walk) and the furniture is black. You need lamps on even in the most sunny summer days. The lights are constantly dimmed, and the temperature is too cold (probably under legal limits, in the winter). Oh and there is some speakers constantly playing music. Overall it looks like it was designed by a teenager trying to be cool.
gareve 3y ago
Is a good time to collect stories of this period in Software. I'm doing it too for my own private archives. I want to compare in 10+ years, how me and my colleagues used to see & experience our industry.
KenArrari 3y ago
Looking back it really is funny how impressed people used to be by dumb office perks. Free food and coffee? Sure, for the convenience. But the slides, the ball pits, the scooters? Sure it might make the office a nice place to be but once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago
  For me even the rather bad office beats working from home. I vastly prefer to work in a different environment from where I live.
- mtmail 3y ago
  I liked the pinball machine we had on our floor (edit: not at github, different company), it was a nice distraction during breaks, something novel. I didn't like that it was installed 10m away from me (loud!)
- paulcole 3y ago
  > once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home For you, it’s really hard to beat working from home. For some people, it’s really hard to beat working from an office.
  - bluepizza 3y ago
    He didn't say it was for everyone, did he?
    - namdnay 3y ago
      > Sure it might make the office a nice place to be but once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home. That was definitely a general statement
    - jeltz 3y ago
      > it really is funny how impressed people used to be Yes, he did. By talking about "people" he obviously meant everyone or at least a clear majority.
    - paulcole 3y ago
      Yes, it was clearly implied when they said, “people.” Otherwise they would have said, “it really is funny how impressed I used to be”.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > But the slides, the ball pits, the scooters? There is an extent to which the "cool tech office designer" role has been fulfilled by people who otherwise might've decorated kindergarten classrooms. It's a very strange convergence.
  - kylecazar 3y ago
    Right? And who are the adults that are drawn to ball pits and slides.
- echelon 3y ago
  I want both. The office is energizing. Collaboration is amazing. Food and amenities take pressure off. White boards, conference rooms. Everything is always clean. Hanging out after hours with an open bar and video games helps with bonding. Working from home is comfortable. There's no pressure, no transit, and you can build it however you like. You can interleave your chores, focus without distraction, and be around the people and pets you love. Both of them are good. I truly want to have both.
  - tinyhouse 3y ago
    Great comment. This is exactly it. The best of both worlds is when you live close to the office and have the flexibility to come and go whenever you please. For companies that means either an office in a place like Manhattan where they know that they can hire young talent in close proximity to the office, or an office somewhere in the suburbs where they can attract older folks.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      No matter where a company is located some percentage of people will have lousy commutes. People buy houses then change jobs. Spouses have jobs a long way in the opposite direction. Commuting into a city is probably going to be bad if you don't live in the city. And so forth. Around major cities, a "good" commute is probably still a good 30 minutes.
      - tinyhouse 3y ago
        True. But even those with lousy commute can come in once a week. My company currently set Thursday as the day everyone is expected to come. It's also the only day with lunch provided. The other days only those with short commutes come in. On Mondays and Fridays the office is usually very quiet. We also have out of state folks. They are of course fully remote but expected to visit the main office 2-3 times a year, depending on their role. The one on my time who is remote said he would've come even if it wasn't required since they get good value from it and feel more energized after a visit.
- matwood 3y ago
  The coolest office perk we had was a ping pong table and keg. We also had a very good table tennis player come by and give us lessons every few weeks. A lot of great memories from that time, but everyone got older, married, had kids, and stopped hanging out after work. About a year before covid we went fully remote. Now, I'll never go into an office again if I can help it. But, if I was in my 20s again I'd probably have a different opinion.
  - tinyhouse 3y ago
    > But, if I was in my 20s again I'd probably have a different opinion. Or in your 60s and empty nester.
    - matwood 3y ago
      > Or in your 60s and empty nester. Between my spouse, dogs, and hobbies, very unlikely.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home. This is fairly subjective/personal. Unless another horrendous global pandemic results in me being legally required to (odds of this seem... medium? The period between the 1918 flu pandemic and covid was historically rather high), I don't plan to work from home again. Not for me, at all; I wouldn't consider taking a remote-only job.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Looking back my best office perk was working in the countryside and having fields to walk through during the lunchbreak.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  Yes, I live for this stuff. I love perks. Remote work killed perks en masse and I hate it. I found when I worked in the office I could just focus. No family members interrupting me because they can (though this has gotten better). Never had to worry about food except maybe dinner. I could roam around free away from my desk and enjoy a quiet office park that allowed me to feel safe. I had access to a very nice gym that was quiet and well maintained. The on-site dentist and doctor was also nice, kept my costs down to virtually zero on both accounts. Pay and stock options were just as good if not better. I’m sad it’s gone to be honest. While I’d likely advocate for a true hybrid solution myself I don’t dismiss the upsides of offices like this at all
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    How did you somehow get your own office and not be forced to work in an open office plan
    - no_wizard 3y ago
      I didn’t. We had high walled cubicles though and buildings / floors were designated (IE only product and engineering worked in my area), and we had plenty of meeting rooms and micro offices for meetings that people didn’t take them at their desk either. I also had really good company paid noise canceling headphones and I’m hard of hearing, so that helped
      - Apocryphon 3y ago
        Sounds like you were able to at least partially avoid the ubiquitous open office trend. Pre-pandemic, many in tech would’ve killed for a cubicle space of their own. It does sound like a rare good modern office space.
        no_wizard 3y ago
        Was my favorite in office experience bar none. I had a different one with open ish plan and I would still take that today. Noise canceling headphones and good culture norms mitigate a lot for me
- mattlondon 3y ago
  > it's still really hard to beat working from home Citation needed. Personally, working from home is an absolute nightmare for me. There is an endless list of chores and things to do around the house that are a constant distraction and mind-space consumer, it is hard to disconnect at the end of the day, I am continually continually interrupted by family members (...and if I am not I am worrying if the kids are ok since why cant I hear them? Are they ok? Are they laying on the floor unconscious? etc etc), cleaners, the post man, the amazon delivery guy/gal, the list is endless. I have to keep half a brain "on-call" to listen out for and react to these interruptions. This is even with a good sized dedicated office room. I did not even have that during covid and my entire family was in one room at a time. At the office I can concentrate and get work done, since it is a workplace and there are no non-work distractions. Any interruptions at work are for work, so it is my job to handle them on work time.
  - Vvector 3y ago
    When you are at the office, who watches your kids? I had a few coworkers that skipped out on daycare when they worked from home. Then they complained about being interrupted all the time by their kids. IMO, there is nothing wrong with putting the kids in daycare while you are working at home.
    - mattlondon 3y ago
      For me, my wife and childcare look after the kids, but you cant just block-out the shouts and noise and screaming and crying. So e.g. blood-curdling scream from your kid and then silence. Or lots of laughing and running about and then a huge crash and bang followed by silence as something is clearly falling over. What do you do? Just shrug and ignore it because there is someone else down there? Of course you cant. 99.9% of the time its all fine, but you can't just turn off that sensation of needing to keep half-a-brain listening for something major happening. The divided attention is a killer for productivity. Out-of-sight-out-of-mind at the office is an absolute godsend. Day care is very, very expensive in the UK (especially if you earn over £100K) so financially it is often not viable to send them to daycare for 5 full days a week (this will often cost £2-3,000 a month in London, often more than a mortgage or rental costs)[1] 1 - personal experience, the only data I could find is UK average of £15K a year (https://www.daynurseries.co.uk/advice/childcare-costs-how-much-do-you-pay-in-the-uk https://www.daynurseries.co.uk/advice/childcare-costs-how-mu...) but that is UK average, not London. For comparison the UK average house price is £285K, but in London it is £742k. I suspect the average figures include a lot of people who earn under 100K and so get some aspect of free care - any tech worker will be earning more than this so gets zero help.
- ElfinTrousers 3y ago
  In practice my favorite perk has turned out to be working without a shirt on hot days. WFH for life it is, then.
mtmail 3y ago
Photos (originally from user Manjuuu in a previous submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107267) https://officesnapshots.com/2015/04/06/github-san-francisco-headquarters/ https://officesnapshots.com/2015/04/06/github-san-francisco-... https://www.officelovin.com/2014/05/inside-githubs-san-francisco-headquarters/ https://www.officelovin.com/2014/05/inside-githubs-san-franc...
- echelon 3y ago
  That's such a gorgeous office! Some of the "glamorous" tech office designs can be sterile and off-putting. Github's is all at once cozy, innovative, quirky, fun, and sophisticated. A target to shoot for, and something that will no doubt be missed.
  - lawgimenez 3y ago
    One of my favorite offices was Squarespace and GitHub's.
    - echelon 3y ago
      > Squarespace Now I want to start a Pinterest board. These are so nice.
- escapedmoose 3y ago
  Does this make anyone else hungry for a burger and a beer? The interior reminds me of the many brewery/restaurants that have come up in town over the past few years.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    The interior reminds me of everything. It is the bootstrap.js of interior design.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    Yeah they look like "generic hamburger place on the expensive side"
c16 3y ago
I once worked in an office which had fake grass all throughout the office. Any metal surface you touched would give you an instant static shock. I now work for a start-up with no perks other than my salary and options. > [we] were so preoccupied with whether or not [we] could, [we] didn't stop to think if [we] should.
mym1990 3y ago
Off topic, but is it not crazy that there are ads plastered on just about every possible place of this write up, yet there are 0 pictures of the actual office?
- fastball 3y ago
  There were a bunch of blank spots in the article, I assumed my ad-blocker was blocking the images. So I turned it off and surprise surprise, it was all just spots for ads. Definitely crazy.
  - tjpnz 3y ago
    Couldn’t read the article due to it being paywalled. Are you telling me that that's the experience they give to people who pay? Jesus f'ing Christ.
    - mym1990 3y ago
      I would pay money to not see that page ever again, I must have gotten a free article thing.
- abusaidm 3y ago
  Was on my phone and thought it was bizarre indeed. Left me hanging and didn’t read the rest of the article.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  It's not off-topic and yes, it is crazy. A picture is worth a thousand words. You may be Kurt Vonnegut or Stephen King, but even if you write a novella about Github's corporate office, it's not going to make me read it without a picture.
- groestl 3y ago
  Came here to say this. Clicked to see a picture, was completely stunned that there wasn't even a single one in there.
contrarian1234 3y ago
Am I crazy ? ..didn't GitHub pretty much pioneer working from home (called "remote work" then) way way way before the pandemic? Definitely before 2016. They were one of the first to scale salaries to where you lived and set a lot of the common industry standards. It was all about dogfooding their own product and working remote using Github itself. They were all about NOT having an office. I never even realized they had an office, let alone a famous one. I remember people would dream about working for Github b/c of the flexibility, The article doesn't even mention this in passing ...
- hakube 3y ago
  Git itself pioneered work from home/anywhere when developers are working on Linux in the early days
- vincentkriek 3y ago
  I think that was gitlab
  - fastball 3y ago
    OP is definitely thinking of GitLab.
  - jeltz 3y ago
    Yup, it almost certainly was. I know a guy who started working at Gitlab back then.
- gumby 3y ago
  > didn't [GitLab] pretty much pioneer working from home (called "remote work" then) way way way before the pandemic? We were doing this in the early 90s (even before the WWW). Foosball tables, fire engines, beds to nap in, kitchens full of food: none of that is somehow magically new
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    For me 90s job hunting everything looked Regus style corporate
asnyder 3y ago
I remember my walk through Github's office so many years ago, the Oval Office, Situation Room, t-shirt room, just to name a few, and somehow maintained a very chill vibe. Pretty epic stuff, definitely was a shock to this east coaster at the time, made the Bay Area tech scene seem like a paradise comparatively. Was that the pinnacle? I remember many offices at the time were going all out on both coasts. Have things mostly come back down to earth since then?
- philomath_mn 3y ago
  In hindsight, nothing screams ZIRP more than a tech office with a replica of the Oval Office.
Lio 3y ago
> GitHub—which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 The makers of Sharepoint and Sourcesafe bought Github, truly the end of an era. :(
- morsch 3y ago
  Presumably they bought GitHub because that was the best they had to offer, not in spite of it.
- DiabloD3 3y ago
  To be fair, the guys who rejected Sharepoint and Sourcesafe (for being shit) to have secret "illegal" Github Enterprise accounts (not managed by Microsoft Corp, but internally by the team) who later became upper management and executives are the ones that bought Github. Microsoft culturally changed, hard; in some ways good, in some ways bad. Fun fact, they had an internal proposal to buy Github when it was much smaller: rejected by the old guard; then a proposal to clone Github using git instead of Sourcesafe, also rejected. In the end, they bought Github at a muuuuuch more expensive price, and it was still worth it given how half the company was secretly using Github Enterprise and then checking in their "final" work into the big monorepo. Now the monorepo is git, and Microsoft first-party supports git on Windows using their on-top-of-NTFS-because-NTFS-sucks layer.
  - easton 3y ago
    > proposal to clone Github using git instead of Sourcesafe Maybe you're talking about something different, but this happened, didn't it? ADO supports Git alongside TFS (not Sourcesafe, but Sourcesafe has been dead forever and was pretty much dead when GitHub first started). It's very much store-brand GitHub repos, much of it is the same but there's tons of features missing and the code review tools aren't as good. As far as I know (per publicly released blogs/docs/talks), the Windows monorepo lives inside ADO, not GitHub.
    - DiabloD3 3y ago
      AFAIK, ADO came about because of the "clone GH" proposal having died, but somebody wanting to revive it. Microsoft is a big company, there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of recycled ideas. Also, AFAIK, the Microsoft monorepo in git did not originally live in ADO. I'm not sure if it does now, either, although it'd make sense for it to as the ADO dogfooder.
toomanyrichies 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20230531050652/https://www.wired.com/story/github-tech-values/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230531050652/https://www.wired...
alhw 3y ago
I recall when touring the office some kid eating Cheeze-its by the handful and downing cans of Red Bull. Fun times.
jacooper 3y ago
> If tech can look past the totalizing shame it currently feels, it can more honestly evaluate both its accomplishments and its shortcomings, and find a way to weave them together into a memorable public legacy. I don't live in the U.S., but I think the article has over done this no? Shame in the entire sector? This can't be real.
- tartuffe78 3y ago
  Working for a software company in the midwest I feel no shame. Maybe it's different on the west coast with gentrification and the bad reputation of certain FAANG companies at the moment. At the end of the day it's just a job, as long as I'm not working in the defense industry I'm not losing sleep over it.
teepo 3y ago
And check out the old Slack HQ: https://www.officelovin.com/2019/07/a-tour-of-slacks-super-sleek-san-francisco-hq/ https://www.officelovin.com/2019/07/a-tour-of-slacks-super-s...
- Symbiote 3y ago
  Both this and the pictures of the Github office show people primarily working 'casually', lounging on a couch or sat at a normal table. My office may be plain, but at least a proper monitor and an adjustable-height desk is considered essential.
  - lordswork 3y ago
    At least all the Slack HQ seating includes _some_ form of back support. Most of the GitHub seating looks uncomfortable after 1 hour of working in a spot.
  - bombolo 3y ago
    Because they are ashamed to show the open plan rooms with 300 desks back to back.
  - SenHeng 3y ago
    It depends. If I'm deep down in code, I want my 32" 4K monitor. If I'm doing planning or prep work, I quite enjoy unplugging my laptop over to somewhere more comfortable.
- jasonlotito 3y ago
  God that's horrible. One picture of a desk, and that was void of anything. And a single monitor, and generic chairs. You want me to come into the office? Give me an actual office. Anything less is insulting.
falsetableau 3y ago
Wow, this was one of the most cringe and oblivious things I have ever read.
falsetableau 3y ago
wow, this article and the tacky, random, gimmicky office it describes... yet another day where i am thankful that I work in finance where people still have a modicum of taste and don't treat their employees like insufferable children
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  I’ll take a ball pit over a mandatory suit and tie
bitwize 3y ago
"Okay, so like, this is my first day at GitHub. I went into work and they had blueberry açai smoothies and steel-cut oats with yogurt and fruit and that was like, super yummy. Then I stopped and listened to the live band they had playing at the hamburger bar. Then I had my first meeting and it was great..."
xrd 3y ago
It feels like HN leans toward the idea that remote work is always better. I disagree, but I recognize I'm in the minority here. But, I do want to point out that this happened: https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/ https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/ Correlation is not causation, etc. BUT, to me it feels like this kind of thing would not have happened if there had been more consistent in office time. (ducks from the tidal wave of downvotes...) Sure, I imagine that many will say: if people were not in the office, there are not opportunities for sexual harassment! But, I would say, interacting with people face to face leads to better communication and connection. And, in doing so, reduces the likelihood of interactions that are interpreted as sexual harassment, and reduces the likelihood that people will interact with others in a purely sexual way because they have limited exposure to them in person.
- BlargMcLarg 3y ago
  So you're using an article from 2014 and grasping at straws to make a point against WFH or what? Just what are you trying to say here?
- nomdep 3y ago
  Btw, the sexual harassment claim was later proven false by an independent investigation
  - xrd 3y ago
    I didn't know that. That's interesting. Do you think that she felt compelled to assert that indicates that she felt disconnected from her leadership? To me that's important in the context of remote work, that less face time means less connection.
kodah 3y ago
I think the author has a point, but not the point they were trying to make. The love for the word meritocracy in tech came from a culture of optimism. Optimism affected each layer of the system differently. Executives loved these kinds of office spaces because it was an easy sell to investors, partners, future employees, and clients. Their value was expressed in opulence. For engineers that optimism was expressed in attitudes and greenfield development - the slogans of yesteryear are artifacts of that "In meritocracy we trust", and "Don't be evil". Of course, a decade after greenfield development had stuck around it became just the field. There's been a shift in tech recently which I think comes from recognizing that as much as you may desire it to move more quickly, the world moves at its own pace. You can seemingly make the ball move more quickly in the short term but in the lattice of time the ball has still moved marginally. People grew up and realized that the optimism we had worked for a few, but not always the ways we intended, and at times worked backwards. That's not to say we're in a cynical rut, just that things aren't as glossy. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area became unaffordable to live in even for engineers. No longer could you have a house, you had to be happy with an apartment or a condo priced a few orders of magnitude above what national averages were. Commutes became long and those that had moved to SF in the early days or already owned homes voted not to improve expanding train lines so that more workers could come to work while enjoying the same fruits those early workers had. The dream soured. I was in SF as this all changed. I met a wonderful woman, I switched to a remote job, and I moved to a place with less tech workers. I still love writing code, if you visit my house the space dedicated to creativity is quite a set. I have other hobbies though; I have multiple gardens and a greenhouse, a place for chickens, and a space for my dog to run like an idiot. I never got the millions that people would murmur and dream about. I got what $475k in SouthEast Portland, Oregon would afford me and I was more than happy with that. It's why I'm so adamant that working from home is the right thing to do. I don't need a short order cook, my deli guy will do. I don't need a huge space dedicated to open air conversations, Slack huddles out of my parlor or on my patio will do. I don't need a sardine can office to maximize developers/sqft my quiet office will do. The optimism, in my eyes, shifted from one centered around the company and the progress we could make as an industry to, "Where can I go to do what I do and make progress with a community that is not work?" That's to say, tech is rediscovering that it is part of the open world, not the leader of it. Good article; it's thought provoking and I'd read it again. It's a good reminder of where we were a seemingly short time ago.

59 points by lawgimenez 3y ago

This trend for making workspaces ever more like cafes or bars was mystifying even pre covid, especially for offices in downtown locations.

bombolo 3y ago
My office is so dark… the building is central and it has narrow slits for windows. Being surrounded by taller buildings doesn't help. Of course in case a stray ray of sun manages to come almost close to get in, automatic curtains roll out. The walls are just grey cement, the floor is gray carpet (that statically charges you, as you walk) and the furniture is black. You need lamps on even in the most sunny summer days. The lights are constantly dimmed, and the temperature is too cold (probably under legal limits, in the winter). Oh and there is some speakers constantly playing music. Overall it looks like it was designed by a teenager trying to be cool.

gareve 3y ago

Is a good time to collect stories of this period in Software. I'm doing it too for my own private archives. I want to compare in 10+ years, how me and my colleagues used to see & experience our industry.

KenArrari 3y ago

Looking back it really is funny how impressed people used to be by dumb office perks. Free food and coffee? Sure, for the convenience. But the slides, the ball pits, the scooters? Sure it might make the office a nice place to be but once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home.

Andrew_nenakhov 3y ago
For me even the rather bad office beats working from home. I vastly prefer to work in a different environment from where I live.
mtmail 3y ago
I liked the pinball machine we had on our floor (edit: not at github, different company), it was a nice distraction during breaks, something novel. I didn't like that it was installed 10m away from me (loud!)
paulcole 3y ago
> once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home For you, it’s really hard to beat working from home. For some people, it’s really hard to beat working from an office.
- bluepizza 3y ago
  He didn't say it was for everyone, did he?
  - namdnay 3y ago
    > Sure it might make the office a nice place to be but once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home. That was definitely a general statement
  - jeltz 3y ago
    > it really is funny how impressed people used to be Yes, he did. By talking about "people" he obviously meant everyone or at least a clear majority.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Yes, it was clearly implied when they said, “people.” Otherwise they would have said, “it really is funny how impressed I used to be”.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
robertlagrant 3y ago
> But the slides, the ball pits, the scooters? There is an extent to which the "cool tech office designer" role has been fulfilled by people who otherwise might've decorated kindergarten classrooms. It's a very strange convergence.
- kylecazar 3y ago
  Right? And who are the adults that are drawn to ball pits and slides.
echelon 3y ago
I want both. The office is energizing. Collaboration is amazing. Food and amenities take pressure off. White boards, conference rooms. Everything is always clean. Hanging out after hours with an open bar and video games helps with bonding. Working from home is comfortable. There's no pressure, no transit, and you can build it however you like. You can interleave your chores, focus without distraction, and be around the people and pets you love. Both of them are good. I truly want to have both.
- tinyhouse 3y ago
  Great comment. This is exactly it. The best of both worlds is when you live close to the office and have the flexibility to come and go whenever you please. For companies that means either an office in a place like Manhattan where they know that they can hire young talent in close proximity to the office, or an office somewhere in the suburbs where they can attract older folks.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    No matter where a company is located some percentage of people will have lousy commutes. People buy houses then change jobs. Spouses have jobs a long way in the opposite direction. Commuting into a city is probably going to be bad if you don't live in the city. And so forth. Around major cities, a "good" commute is probably still a good 30 minutes.
    - tinyhouse 3y ago
      True. But even those with lousy commute can come in once a week. My company currently set Thursday as the day everyone is expected to come. It's also the only day with lunch provided. The other days only those with short commutes come in. On Mondays and Fridays the office is usually very quiet. We also have out of state folks. They are of course fully remote but expected to visit the main office 2-3 times a year, depending on their role. The one on my time who is remote said he would've come even if it wasn't required since they get good value from it and feel more energized after a visit.
matwood 3y ago
The coolest office perk we had was a ping pong table and keg. We also had a very good table tennis player come by and give us lessons every few weeks. A lot of great memories from that time, but everyone got older, married, had kids, and stopped hanging out after work. About a year before covid we went fully remote. Now, I'll never go into an office again if I can help it. But, if I was in my 20s again I'd probably have a different opinion.
- tinyhouse 3y ago
  > But, if I was in my 20s again I'd probably have a different opinion. Or in your 60s and empty nester.
  - matwood 3y ago
    > Or in your 60s and empty nester. Between my spouse, dogs, and hobbies, very unlikely.
rsynnott 3y ago
> once the novelty wears off it's still really hard to beat working from home. This is fairly subjective/personal. Unless another horrendous global pandemic results in me being legally required to (odds of this seem... medium? The period between the 1918 flu pandemic and covid was historically rather high), I don't plan to work from home again. Not for me, at all; I wouldn't consider taking a remote-only job.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Looking back my best office perk was working in the countryside and having fields to walk through during the lunchbreak.
no_wizard 3y ago
Yes, I live for this stuff. I love perks. Remote work killed perks en masse and I hate it. I found when I worked in the office I could just focus. No family members interrupting me because they can (though this has gotten better). Never had to worry about food except maybe dinner. I could roam around free away from my desk and enjoy a quiet office park that allowed me to feel safe. I had access to a very nice gym that was quiet and well maintained. The on-site dentist and doctor was also nice, kept my costs down to virtually zero on both accounts. Pay and stock options were just as good if not better. I’m sad it’s gone to be honest. While I’d likely advocate for a true hybrid solution myself I don’t dismiss the upsides of offices like this at all
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  How did you somehow get your own office and not be forced to work in an open office plan
  - no_wizard 3y ago
    I didn’t. We had high walled cubicles though and buildings / floors were designated (IE only product and engineering worked in my area), and we had plenty of meeting rooms and micro offices for meetings that people didn’t take them at their desk either. I also had really good company paid noise canceling headphones and I’m hard of hearing, so that helped
    - Apocryphon 3y ago
      Sounds like you were able to at least partially avoid the ubiquitous open office trend. Pre-pandemic, many in tech would’ve killed for a cubicle space of their own. It does sound like a rare good modern office space.
      - no_wizard 3y ago
        Was my favorite in office experience bar none. I had a different one with open ish plan and I would still take that today. Noise canceling headphones and good culture norms mitigate a lot for me
mattlondon 3y ago
> it's still really hard to beat working from home Citation needed. Personally, working from home is an absolute nightmare for me. There is an endless list of chores and things to do around the house that are a constant distraction and mind-space consumer, it is hard to disconnect at the end of the day, I am continually continually interrupted by family members (...and if I am not I am worrying if the kids are ok since why cant I hear them? Are they ok? Are they laying on the floor unconscious? etc etc), cleaners, the post man, the amazon delivery guy/gal, the list is endless. I have to keep half a brain "on-call" to listen out for and react to these interruptions. This is even with a good sized dedicated office room. I did not even have that during covid and my entire family was in one room at a time. At the office I can concentrate and get work done, since it is a workplace and there are no non-work distractions. Any interruptions at work are for work, so it is my job to handle them on work time.
- Vvector 3y ago
  When you are at the office, who watches your kids? I had a few coworkers that skipped out on daycare when they worked from home. Then they complained about being interrupted all the time by their kids. IMO, there is nothing wrong with putting the kids in daycare while you are working at home.
  - mattlondon 3y ago
    For me, my wife and childcare look after the kids, but you cant just block-out the shouts and noise and screaming and crying. So e.g. blood-curdling scream from your kid and then silence. Or lots of laughing and running about and then a huge crash and bang followed by silence as something is clearly falling over. What do you do? Just shrug and ignore it because there is someone else down there? Of course you cant. 99.9% of the time its all fine, but you can't just turn off that sensation of needing to keep half-a-brain listening for something major happening. The divided attention is a killer for productivity. Out-of-sight-out-of-mind at the office is an absolute godsend. Day care is very, very expensive in the UK (especially if you earn over £100K) so financially it is often not viable to send them to daycare for 5 full days a week (this will often cost £2-3,000 a month in London, often more than a mortgage or rental costs)[1] 1 - personal experience, the only data I could find is UK average of £15K a year (https://www.daynurseries.co.uk/advice/childcare-costs-how-much-do-you-pay-in-the-uk https://www.daynurseries.co.uk/advice/childcare-costs-how-mu...) but that is UK average, not London. For comparison the UK average house price is £285K, but in London it is £742k. I suspect the average figures include a lot of people who earn under 100K and so get some aspect of free care - any tech worker will be earning more than this so gets zero help.
ElfinTrousers 3y ago
In practice my favorite perk has turned out to be working without a shirt on hot days. WFH for life it is, then.

mtmail 3y ago

Photos (originally from user Manjuuu in a previous submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107267) https://officesnapshots.com/2015/04/06/github-san-francisco-headquarters/ https://officesnapshots.com/2015/04/06/github-san-francisco-... https://www.officelovin.com/2014/05/inside-githubs-san-francisco-headquarters/ https://www.officelovin.com/2014/05/inside-githubs-san-franc...

echelon 3y ago
That's such a gorgeous office! Some of the "glamorous" tech office designs can be sterile and off-putting. Github's is all at once cozy, innovative, quirky, fun, and sophisticated. A target to shoot for, and something that will no doubt be missed.
- lawgimenez 3y ago
  One of my favorite offices was Squarespace and GitHub's.
  - echelon 3y ago
    > Squarespace Now I want to start a Pinterest board. These are so nice.
escapedmoose 3y ago
Does this make anyone else hungry for a burger and a beer? The interior reminds me of the many brewery/restaurants that have come up in town over the past few years.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  The interior reminds me of everything. It is the bootstrap.js of interior design.
- bombolo 3y ago
  Yeah they look like "generic hamburger place on the expensive side"

c16 3y ago

I once worked in an office which had fake grass all throughout the office. Any metal surface you touched would give you an instant static shock. I now work for a start-up with no perks other than my salary and options. > [we] were so preoccupied with whether or not [we] could, [we] didn't stop to think if [we] should.

mym1990 3y ago

Off topic, but is it not crazy that there are ads plastered on just about every possible place of this write up, yet there are 0 pictures of the actual office?

fastball 3y ago
There were a bunch of blank spots in the article, I assumed my ad-blocker was blocking the images. So I turned it off and surprise surprise, it was all just spots for ads. Definitely crazy.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  Couldn’t read the article due to it being paywalled. Are you telling me that that's the experience they give to people who pay? Jesus f'ing Christ.
  - mym1990 3y ago
    I would pay money to not see that page ever again, I must have gotten a free article thing.
abusaidm 3y ago
Was on my phone and thought it was bizarre indeed. Left me hanging and didn’t read the rest of the article.
antisthenes 3y ago
It's not off-topic and yes, it is crazy. A picture is worth a thousand words. You may be Kurt Vonnegut or Stephen King, but even if you write a novella about Github's corporate office, it's not going to make me read it without a picture.
groestl 3y ago
Came here to say this. Clicked to see a picture, was completely stunned that there wasn't even a single one in there.

contrarian1234 3y ago

Am I crazy ? ..didn't GitHub pretty much pioneer working from home (called "remote work" then) way way way before the pandemic? Definitely before 2016. They were one of the first to scale salaries to where you lived and set a lot of the common industry standards. It was all about dogfooding their own product and working remote using Github itself. They were all about NOT having an office. I never even realized they had an office, let alone a famous one. I remember people would dream about working for Github b/c of the flexibility, The article doesn't even mention this in passing ...

hakube 3y ago
Git itself pioneered work from home/anywhere when developers are working on Linux in the early days
vincentkriek 3y ago
I think that was gitlab
- fastball 3y ago
  OP is definitely thinking of GitLab.
- jeltz 3y ago
  Yup, it almost certainly was. I know a guy who started working at Gitlab back then.
gumby 3y ago
> didn't [GitLab] pretty much pioneer working from home (called "remote work" then) way way way before the pandemic? We were doing this in the early 90s (even before the WWW). Foosball tables, fire engines, beds to nap in, kitchens full of food: none of that is somehow magically new
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  For me 90s job hunting everything looked Regus style corporate

asnyder 3y ago

I remember my walk through Github's office so many years ago, the Oval Office, Situation Room, t-shirt room, just to name a few, and somehow maintained a very chill vibe. Pretty epic stuff, definitely was a shock to this east coaster at the time, made the Bay Area tech scene seem like a paradise comparatively. Was that the pinnacle? I remember many offices at the time were going all out on both coasts. Have things mostly come back down to earth since then?

philomath_mn 3y ago
In hindsight, nothing screams ZIRP more than a tech office with a replica of the Oval Office.

Lio 3y ago

> GitHub—which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 The makers of Sharepoint and Sourcesafe bought Github, truly the end of an era. :(

morsch 3y ago
Presumably they bought GitHub because that was the best they had to offer, not in spite of it.
DiabloD3 3y ago
To be fair, the guys who rejected Sharepoint and Sourcesafe (for being shit) to have secret "illegal" Github Enterprise accounts (not managed by Microsoft Corp, but internally by the team) who later became upper management and executives are the ones that bought Github. Microsoft culturally changed, hard; in some ways good, in some ways bad. Fun fact, they had an internal proposal to buy Github when it was much smaller: rejected by the old guard; then a proposal to clone Github using git instead of Sourcesafe, also rejected. In the end, they bought Github at a muuuuuch more expensive price, and it was still worth it given how half the company was secretly using Github Enterprise and then checking in their "final" work into the big monorepo. Now the monorepo is git, and Microsoft first-party supports git on Windows using their on-top-of-NTFS-because-NTFS-sucks layer.
- easton 3y ago
  > proposal to clone Github using git instead of Sourcesafe Maybe you're talking about something different, but this happened, didn't it? ADO supports Git alongside TFS (not Sourcesafe, but Sourcesafe has been dead forever and was pretty much dead when GitHub first started). It's very much store-brand GitHub repos, much of it is the same but there's tons of features missing and the code review tools aren't as good. As far as I know (per publicly released blogs/docs/talks), the Windows monorepo lives inside ADO, not GitHub.
  - DiabloD3 3y ago
    AFAIK, ADO came about because of the "clone GH" proposal having died, but somebody wanting to revive it. Microsoft is a big company, there's a lot of moving parts and a lot of recycled ideas. Also, AFAIK, the Microsoft monorepo in git did not originally live in ADO. I'm not sure if it does now, either, although it'd make sense for it to as the ADO dogfooder.

toomanyrichies 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20230531050652/https://www.wired.com/story/github-tech-values/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230531050652/https://www.wired...

alhw 3y ago

I recall when touring the office some kid eating Cheeze-its by the handful and downing cans of Red Bull. Fun times.

jacooper 3y ago

> If tech can look past the totalizing shame it currently feels, it can more honestly evaluate both its accomplishments and its shortcomings, and find a way to weave them together into a memorable public legacy. I don't live in the U.S., but I think the article has over done this no? Shame in the entire sector? This can't be real.

tartuffe78 3y ago
Working for a software company in the midwest I feel no shame. Maybe it's different on the west coast with gentrification and the bad reputation of certain FAANG companies at the moment. At the end of the day it's just a job, as long as I'm not working in the defense industry I'm not losing sleep over it.

teepo 3y ago

And check out the old Slack HQ: https://www.officelovin.com/2019/07/a-tour-of-slacks-super-sleek-san-francisco-hq/ https://www.officelovin.com/2019/07/a-tour-of-slacks-super-s...

Symbiote 3y ago
Both this and the pictures of the Github office show people primarily working 'casually', lounging on a couch or sat at a normal table. My office may be plain, but at least a proper monitor and an adjustable-height desk is considered essential.
- lordswork 3y ago
  At least all the Slack HQ seating includes _some_ form of back support. Most of the GitHub seating looks uncomfortable after 1 hour of working in a spot.
- bombolo 3y ago
  Because they are ashamed to show the open plan rooms with 300 desks back to back.
- SenHeng 3y ago
  It depends. If I'm deep down in code, I want my 32" 4K monitor. If I'm doing planning or prep work, I quite enjoy unplugging my laptop over to somewhere more comfortable.
jasonlotito 3y ago
God that's horrible. One picture of a desk, and that was void of anything. And a single monitor, and generic chairs. You want me to come into the office? Give me an actual office. Anything less is insulting.

falsetableau 3y ago

Wow, this was one of the most cringe and oblivious things I have ever read.

falsetableau 3y ago

wow, this article and the tacky, random, gimmicky office it describes... yet another day where i am thankful that I work in finance where people still have a modicum of taste and don't treat their employees like insufferable children

kevinventullo 3y ago
I’ll take a ball pit over a mandatory suit and tie

bitwize 3y ago

"Okay, so like, this is my first day at GitHub. I went into work and they had blueberry açai smoothies and steel-cut oats with yogurt and fruit and that was like, super yummy. Then I stopped and listened to the live band they had playing at the hamburger bar. Then I had my first meeting and it was great..."

xrd 3y ago

It feels like HN leans toward the idea that remote work is always better. I disagree, but I recognize I'm in the minority here. But, I do want to point out that this happened: https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/ https://www.wired.com/2014/04/tom-pw/ Correlation is not causation, etc. BUT, to me it feels like this kind of thing would not have happened if there had been more consistent in office time. (ducks from the tidal wave of downvotes...) Sure, I imagine that many will say: if people were not in the office, there are not opportunities for sexual harassment! But, I would say, interacting with people face to face leads to better communication and connection. And, in doing so, reduces the likelihood of interactions that are interpreted as sexual harassment, and reduces the likelihood that people will interact with others in a purely sexual way because they have limited exposure to them in person.

BlargMcLarg 3y ago
So you're using an article from 2014 and grasping at straws to make a point against WFH or what? Just what are you trying to say here?
nomdep 3y ago
Btw, the sexual harassment claim was later proven false by an independent investigation
- xrd 3y ago
  I didn't know that. That's interesting. Do you think that she felt compelled to assert that indicates that she felt disconnected from her leadership? To me that's important in the context of remote work, that less face time means less connection.

kodah 3y ago

I think the author has a point, but not the point they were trying to make. The love for the word meritocracy in tech came from a culture of optimism. Optimism affected each layer of the system differently. Executives loved these kinds of office spaces because it was an easy sell to investors, partners, future employees, and clients. Their value was expressed in opulence. For engineers that optimism was expressed in attitudes and greenfield development - the slogans of yesteryear are artifacts of that "In meritocracy we trust", and "Don't be evil". Of course, a decade after greenfield development had stuck around it became just the field. There's been a shift in tech recently which I think comes from recognizing that as much as you may desire it to move more quickly, the world moves at its own pace. You can seemingly make the ball move more quickly in the short term but in the lattice of time the ball has still moved marginally. People grew up and realized that the optimism we had worked for a few, but not always the ways we intended, and at times worked backwards. That's not to say we're in a cynical rut, just that things aren't as glossy. San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area became unaffordable to live in even for engineers. No longer could you have a house, you had to be happy with an apartment or a condo priced a few orders of magnitude above what national averages were. Commutes became long and those that had moved to SF in the early days or already owned homes voted not to improve expanding train lines so that more workers could come to work while enjoying the same fruits those early workers had. The dream soured. I was in SF as this all changed. I met a wonderful woman, I switched to a remote job, and I moved to a place with less tech workers. I still love writing code, if you visit my house the space dedicated to creativity is quite a set. I have other hobbies though; I have multiple gardens and a greenhouse, a place for chickens, and a space for my dog to run like an idiot. I never got the millions that people would murmur and dream about. I got what $475k in SouthEast Portland, Oregon would afford me and I was more than happy with that. It's why I'm so adamant that working from home is the right thing to do. I don't need a short order cook, my deli guy will do. I don't need a huge space dedicated to open air conversations, Slack huddles out of my parlor or on my patio will do. I don't need a sardine can office to maximize developers/sqft my quiet office will do. The optimism, in my eyes, shifted from one centered around the company and the progress we could make as an industry to, "Where can I go to do what I do and make progress with a community that is not work?" That's to say, tech is rediscovering that it is part of the open world, not the leader of it. Good article; it's thought provoking and I'd read it again. It's a good reminder of where we were a seemingly short time ago.