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> Every morning GitHubbers choose where they want to work: in one of two bars, several cafes, a library, a park, a speakeasy, a museum, a coder cave, or from ho

> Every morning GitHubbers choose where they want to work: in one of two bars, several cafes, a library, a park, a speakeasy, a museum, a coder cave, or from home. This is what it looks like when you have more money than sense. Just imagine. You want to build an office for people to work in to create your business. So you build a half dozen unrelated storefronts, just so your workers have the convenience of working from some other business. If you didn't have the money to build that, what would you do instead? Text your coworkers to meet up at a real dive bar, coffee shop, library, museum. Take the money you would have spent on a plush office, and instead invest it in the actual business: more unique value-adding feature development, more customer engagement / support / UX, more reliability, more training and iteration on remote culture.

Bluestrike2 3y ago
The thinking behind those kinds of perks is that they'll keep employees on-site longer, and that the additional time is at least somewhat productive. If you accept that supposition, then having nice and/or "fun" offices becomes justifiable...to a certain degree, anyhow; there's a very real limit to what you can reasonably squeeze out of people, after all. Now, if I wanted to be cynical, I'd think that building what amounts to a bar in your office might be an effort to try and bring the illusion of a healthy work/life balance into the office to squeeze out a couple extra hours of work. If it looks like a bar and feels like a bar, will working in that bar still feel like working? For the most part, but it's that little difference that might be important. That said, I don't actually think it's so blatantly manipulative. If people were already a bit more on the unhealthy side of a work/life balance--something that isn't exactly unheard of with plenty of tech companies--the design choice probably felt like it was reintroducing, at least to some extent, something already missing for some employees. In any case, given the cost of building and furnishing new offices considered "nice" or "fancy" in this context, designing sections of the office to look like bars, libraries, or the Oval Office probably didn't add much to the overall budget. After all, you were going to furnish those areas, anyhow. For anything over that, you'd likely try to justify it in terms of increased employee morale and comfort.

Bluestrike2 3y ago

The thinking behind those kinds of perks is that they'll keep employees on-site longer, and that the additional time is at least somewhat productive. If you accept that supposition, then having nice and/or "fun" offices becomes justifiable...to a certain degree, anyhow; there's a very real limit to what you can reasonably squeeze out of people, after all. Now, if I wanted to be cynical, I'd think that building what amounts to a bar in your office might be an effort to try and bring the illusion of a healthy work/life balance into the office to squeeze out a couple extra hours of work. If it looks like a bar and feels like a bar, will working in that bar still feel like working? For the most part, but it's that little difference that might be important. That said, I don't actually think it's so blatantly manipulative. If people were already a bit more on the unhealthy side of a work/life balance--something that isn't exactly unheard of with plenty of tech companies--the design choice probably felt like it was reintroducing, at least to some extent, something already missing for some employees. In any case, given the cost of building and furnishing new offices considered "nice" or "fancy" in this context, designing sections of the office to look like bars, libraries, or the Oval Office probably didn't add much to the overall budget. After all, you were going to furnish those areas, anyhow. For anything over that, you'd likely try to justify it in terms of increased employee morale and comfort.