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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".

Look, you can't have it both ways. People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it's going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that.

Which is it?

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

I'll contend that while I've been fully taken advantage of remote work (and probably want my next job to be remote too), I still fully believe it's a long term "leading lambs to the slaughter" type of plan. Companies save big on remote in so many ways. No more offices. No more weekly happy hours (just do a company retreat every 6 months). They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose. Don't need to bother with those pesky things called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.

It's short term benefits for all, but ultimately the workers will lose out.

Maybe, but that works both ways. Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships, or if getting a new job would entail moving to a new city/state/country, even if jumping ship would entail a sizable payraise or other improvement in working conditions.

In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.

> Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships, or if getting a new job would entail moving to a new city/state/country, even if jumping ship would entail a sizable payraise or other improvement in working conditions.

Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with. That was sarcasm. One of the reasons I didn’t take a remote job last year was the lack of deep social connections I’ve experienced in other remote work.

I’ve observed that the best work is often done by small teams with deep social connections. Think the original Mac team in 1983 or id software in the early 90s. I want to like and even love some of the people I work with, even if the time is short and I’m fired. Because life is short and even a couple years with someone I connected with is valuable when it’s 8 hours a day for 1/40 of my life.

When you’re young maybe, but after ten or fifteen years of “deep social connections”, working remote can be quite peaceful and satisfying. Personally I’ve always been more productive working at home.

Well I'm 35. You can decide if that's young or old. Some people are just more social than others of course.

Being social is fine. That’s what I have real friends for. I don’t need pretend friends at work.

I always see this parroted by people on HN and it's such a pathetic stance to take.

Every job I've been at I've formed close friends. My closest friends include people from every job and I don't think it's a coincidence. These friendships are just as real (and I'd argue stronger) than your "real" friends.

Maybe the problem is with you and you are just somebody people don't like? Or you think you shouldn't be making friends at work which is kind of sad.

I have collected work friends since 1998. Most of the time it dwindles to one or two per job, after a few years. But former colleagues now outnumber friends from primary school (1), highschool (0), college (5), sports I used to play (0), bars I drank at (0), places I used to live (3) and where I live now, ie: neighbours (6).

Should you create life-long bonds with people because of accidents of geography, or because you have chosen to spend your working life doing the same thing? Even the incidental friendships you make at the water cooler with people who just happen to be working in the same company are as valid as the ones you make when you're walking your dog.

Why did you jump to assuming people don’t like the parent poster? It’s totally possible that they get on well with everyone but don’t feel the need to go for after work drinks with them.

I encourage you to find you’re friends where you want, but where I live, having close friends at work just isn’t done (and never has been).

Despite this, the weekends are always busy with friends from outside of work. I find it builds a strong community.

For my part, I work for a Silicon Valley company and therefore do have some close friends at my job, I get the best of both worlds.

The reality is outside of work you pick your friends. At work, you're placed on a team with other people and you have no choice but to work with them. Sometimes they're great, but sometimes they're people you want nothing to do with, but they're on your team so you suck it up and make it work to the extent required by the job.

Over my career I've both worked with people that I've voluntarily kept in touch with after our time together ended (we even occasionally float the idea of jumping ship and going into business together) and people that drove me up the wall who I couldn't wait to get out of my life (as people, not even necessarily that they were unproductive employees, although some of them were). If I could just have less of those forced interactions due to physical proximity, then I'd have more social energy to spend on people I actually want to spend it on.

Not really. you can't force anyone to be your friend, and if there is some supericial reason someone doesn't like you, you can't really change that (not without a big change I guess. I'm sure if you got ripped you'd suddenly have a lot more "friends). You're at the mercy of luck in where you meet and who clicks with you. And that gets harder as meetups and socialties become more based around how drunk you get or if you like sports. I like neither.

I don't even know how you find "real friends" these days without being friends since grade school/college. Been trying for years in meetups to make real friends and nothing clicks. I have some good friends but they are as busy as I am and syncing up to meet is hard.

No one is saying they can’t make friends at work. They are saying there is a big difference in quality between work friendships and non-work friendships. The point is that if the main reason you are all associating is because you are being paid to, that the relationship can be severed when someone is fired, and that when you take a new job those relationships are quickly replaced by new ones, then it isn’t actually a strong relationship.

Actual friendships aren’t monetarily driven.

I had friends at the office and even a kind of crush. One month into the pandemic, we just didn't care about trying to keep the non-work banter going. It's a forced situation; romance as a result of shared stressors in particular is well documented, but not necessarily healthier than just meeting someone randomly.

Social != friends.

You're young and I agree with your assessment. I also think that working close together is fundamental to start something new quickly, especially if the team doesn't know each other well. Think of new hires in a new company of any kind. However I rather pick something to work from home and keep my social life for the evenings and the weekends. It's so much more convenient than having to commute, from 10 minutes to one hour. And not be bound to 9-18.

While I've not worked fully remotely for my actual job, I've had a "remote" side-project for about a decade now.

Some of the people I've worked with on it, I've made friends with—ranging from "friendly working relationship" to "would totally hang out with IRL if that were an option."

I'm also a member of a small online community that's about the same age, that includes a bunch of people who have never met physically, and probably never will, but who are very close friends, help each other through some pretty rough times, and are generally very supportive of each other.

"Remote" doesn't have to mean "never interact outside of pure work". You can 100% make friends remotely. Granted, it's not exactly the same type of social interaction as hanging out with someone in a physical space, but it's certainly social interaction—and for many people (me included), it's often better, because it doesn't have the same kinds of demands and pressures as physical interaction. As an introvert, it's much less draining for me to interact virtually.

If that's not true of you—if you're both someone who craves genuine physical interaction, and someone for whom the workplace is the primary place you want to get that—no one (or, well, nearly no one) is saying you shouldn't have access to that. We're just saying your experience is not universal, and we want to make sure there are a healthy variety of options for people with different needs and desires.

>Yeah you know I’d much rather work in a place where I have a very limited relationship with the people I spend at least 8 hours a day with.

I would. No sarcasm. With the caveat that I don't have to spend 9 hours a day with them, as I'm not forced into an office space with them.

I've also found that working at companies which push for closer employee social bonds with countless office activities, quarterly teambuilding events, parties, etc. actually diminished my QoL. I realized that what I actually want are deep connections with people I like, not someone someone else hired to work on the same project. All those (imo, meaningless) socializing activities cut into my free time I could have been spending with friends and family. Working remotely also frees up time I would be wasting on commutes.

When you can't get the former, the latter is still a nice backup. Remote works can end with neither.

It depends on the company. Some places are very social others not so much.

>Employees are often reluctant to leave jobs where they have a lot of personal relationships

That sounds like having a life. I guess the alternative is to isolate yourself to a point where you don't have any personal relationships. No hard choices then.

idk I religiously firewall my work and personal life but still feel a lot of "personal work employment inertia":

    - I know that everyone doesn't suck to work with
    - I know who to ask for specific institutional knowledge, or to get something done through unofficial channels
    - I know who is more or less competent in specific domains
    - I know what kind of work people do and do not enjoy

This type of knowledge is far more valuable than many people realize. When you see people who get things done, get more raises, or seem to do great work without working so hard... then they know things about how to operate in the organization.

> you don't have any personal relationships.

You mean work relationships?

I have relationships outside work. Though, I'm fully remote and also have work relationships.

The average tenure at most tech companies are around 3 years. I assure you that most of your “friends” at work won’t keep in touch with you three years after you leave.

Perhaps the UK is different (Im making assumptions obvs) but I’ve kept in touch with quite a few from each job I’ve worked in - potentially 50% of my friends are people Ive worked with.

I also see “acquaintances” keeping in touch with ex-colleagues on some social media sites, so I know Im not an exception.

I appreciate “most” isnt all, but your comment is very different to my decade of experience. Work is a great place to form friendships.

I do think there's a big cultural difference. I've worked over a decade each in the UK, Australia, and now the US. In the UK and Australia, it was very common to hang out with colleagues socially, but I see it rarely in the US. Maybe it has to do with the "pub culture" in the UK and Aus, and a few beers after work being common, which it doesn't seem to be in the US (at least where I've lived - places with a 'bar scene' like New York may be quite different).

I may be biased due to getting older and having a family, so I'd expect to hang out after work less anyway, but I observe that generally amongst younger colleagues too.

When I was younger at my second job between 25-34, we all had more money than sense (not anywhere near what we can make today) and it was a combination of men and women. We were all single, hung out at each others house, went to strip clubs together (yes the women too) went on overnight trips at cabins together. But as we got older, and settle down, we became more of “coworkers”. I keep in touch with a couple of them once or twice a year.

At my third job between 2008-2012, I keep in touch with one guy that followed me across two more jobs until 2015. We try to meet along with one of my coworkers from my third job at least once per quarter.

I also met my second and current wife at my third job. But I can’t honestly say whether I would have tried dating her if I hadn’t known that the company we worked at was about to go under anyway.

I had a Slack group where I kept in touch with 5 of my coworkers from my 5th job between 2014-2016. But that died off.

When I go back to my home state, I am going to try to connect with my former CTO and a couple of other people from my 7th job (2018-2020). My former CTO reaches out to me every now and then and we talk. I owe him, he gave me a chance to lead their “cloud native initiatives” and hired me even though I had never opened the AWS console at the time. But he thought “I had some good ideas” even though he knew I had just watched a video and went through a certification training.

Now that I work remotely at AWS in the consulting department, there isn’t anyone I consider a “friend”, but one person who I worked with from the time they were an intern when I was their mentor.

The “team” I work with changes dynamically based on the project.

Going to brothels with coworkers at the end of the day was a common thing regardless of marital status back in the day here (before my time).

Not sure what happened

Complete opposite experience for me. Worked for a startup a couple of years as a young dev, made some amazing friends including my wife. 12 years later we're all quite a bit older and still meet up every couple of months (and now our kids are best friends).

I’ve been working for 25 years across 8 companies. Only two of them has anyone heard of. One was a fortune 10 company at the time (ruined by the decisions of Jack Welch) and one is currently a fortune 10 company. I keep in touch in real life with three people. One person followed me between three companies between 2008-2015 and I married the other.

Well the average person only has a few close friends. It sounds like you made at least one (your wife) at work, so having a work place where deep social connections are possible was very valuable to you.

That's fine, then I'll have friends in one place for three years, and then I'll have friends in another place for three years. I don't see the problem here.

The problem where you end up not making any friends and you're all alone now because your Meetup groups are bust.

A 2080 worker who works 35 years will spend over 8 entire years of their life at their job.

I have plenty of friends in real life and plenty of things to do, but I do value, at least somewhat a good work environment considering how much of my life I'm going to spend in it.

Or, just do some socializing outside of work.

People keep saying that.

Humans don't work like that. Almost all meaningful relations are based on prolonged proximity.

Very few (but not zero!) of my meaningful relations have been through work.

meanwhile all my post college relations have been through work and I've struggled to try and make friends outside of work. Unironic advice seems to be to make friends with co-workers. And meetups, which I have yet to form a signifigant bond at (when most people flake after 1-2 sessions and sessions are monthly, I can't blame them).

This is so sad to hear and it's insane how many people on HN are against the idea of forming friendships at work.

Ya'll really are socially inept.

Nobody is against it. People are just reflecting their lived experience.

What’s sad and socially inept is that you’re demonstrating no ability to empathise with that.

I think you misunderstand. It's the opposite; it's that our non-work relationships are more meaningful, not that we are unable to form friendships at work.

Way too many people (mostly when young) fall into this trap of making their work their life. Don't be one of those people!

I am not sure why you would say that. I mean it is true, but I am not sure how it is relevant here. If one avenue is not there, ones that crave it badly enough will venture forth. If I don't go to work and WANT to engage with others so badly, I will. And besides, meaningful relations is a meaningless term.

Example. My parent has neighbors. They have lived closely to one another. So closely and long, in fact, they had to sue to resolve some outstanding issues. In other words, neither prolonged proximity or meaningful relationship is a useful metric. I will trade those for a new neighbor every year.

Humans work like they always worked. Their predilections move them. If those are not satisfied, they are channeled.

The big problem these days is age. My neighhbors seem fine but are in different stages in life. I more or less inherited this house but it's a house built for families to be raised. So all my neighbors are 40's+ taking care of at best very young teenage kids, and I'm a 20's tech dude. Not much clicks.

>If one avenue is not there, ones that crave it badly enough will venture forth

I guess all my 20's demograpic in town don't crave socialiation. Or I guess literally all of them are in bars. Not my scene.

This is what I have seen so far. The younger cousins in my extended family consciously opted to live in Chicago-Chicago specifically due to night life. I will admit that I never understood it ( and I moved to suburbs as soon as it became an option for me ). Naturally, all anecdotal, but I doubt people changed that much over 20 or so years.

If your health limits your active hours to barely more than you can work, you won’t. In that case, you get very lonely, from my experience.

You have a point and I actually understand that rationale. I have no real argument against it beyond general question of whether individual loneliness should be solved with my forced presence.

You must hang out with some poor quality humans.

My meaningful relationships are based on how much I like the people.

Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly.

Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view, not whether we worked on unrelated things in the same neck of the woods.

I've been in the work world for almost 40 years now and I have just one friend I met at work. Most of my friends are people I met through purest chance who happen to have similar world-views.

> Liking someone is based on how similar we are in aesthetics, politics, philosophy, and world view

I’m a pretty social person, and have great relationships both at work and outside of work: this list you’ve provided made me recoil in disagreement. The first two items are aesthetics and politics!? Even philosophy and world view I cannot strongly agree with.

Not saying that this isn’t true for you, and that’s genuinely fine. But I wouldn’t agree that you can generalize your preferences in relationships to others if the quoted sentence is genuinely true.

Mutual respect, friendliness, interest, shared experiences come to mind for me, though I admittedly typed that up in a few seconds without thinking very much about it.

I like (and appear to be liked by) many people where our politics are quite different, including my spouse. I value “how interesting are you to interact with?” far more than “how perfect a mirror are you?”

>Sitting within X meters of someone doesn't make me like them particularly

I'm not goint to like nor even remember every neightbor, but it gives me OPPORTUNITY. You need some luck to make friends post college, and luck is simply opportunity + preoaration.

Especially post COVID, opportunities are sparse. All I want is a chance. If we don't click, cool. The kind of people that I probably click with aren't going to random meetups I guess.

My dad retired from his factory job last year. Outside of company Xmas events, he met his colleagues exactly 0 times in a social context while he worked there.

I would argue that proximity matters, but there are many different ways of slicing proximity.

Certainly moving away from friends so that I no longer can interact with them routinely would affect the relationship.

But you can also view proximity as how often people show up in your routine. There are many people I knew and had solid friendships with just because we put in the effort to call or message in the evenings a few times a week.

Yes, and the point is that if you or your coworker is laid off or take a new job, that proximity is immediately nullified and the relationship typically withers and dies.

Spend less time socializing at work, and more time creating that prolonged proximity outside of work, so that relationships of your choosing can be formed that are less subject to the whims of your bosses and the economy.

>so that relationships of your choosing can be formed

and then you realize no one wants to choose you back and maybe your niche geeky tech company is the best place to find fellow introverts.

that's why I show up to my olympic weightlifting club, and music shows, and acroyoga jams regularly.

I do like my co-workers. A lot. But if seeing them in the office was my only social life I'd die. I can't speak for everyone, but personally the time/effort invested into forming meaningful relations by regularly showing up to places where I can engage with others who have similar interests (oly lifting, music, acroyoga) has probably been the best thing I've done for myself.

And being able to work remotely greatly facilitates that.

>But if seeing them in the office was my only social life I'd die.

great. Now imagine if you didn't have that nor any clubs where you felt welcome. That's the situation for many people who do make friends at work.

even if that were the case, the only place you're getting prolonged proximity to a (relatively) fixed group of people is your workplace? that sounds super not good.

Employee and employer are not on equal footing. This is better understood among the workers in other industries. The current situation with supply and demand of CS workers has led some to believe that this trend will never die. It may not stay like this and if/when that day comes, lord help us for we are not prepared.

It's happened time and time again.

I'm currently reading Marx Das Kapital and it's amazing how all the narratives are more or less exactly the same. The worker is lazy, society will collapse if every moment of time is not taken from the socialised labour etc.

This never seems to end.

>In an industry where remote work is the norm and changing jobs doesn't even require changing offices, people are much less likely to give up some pay to stay where they are.

yea and I already feel those effects. had an office for one month and then they closed it in order to transfer elsewhere. Was already configured to WFH so no issue transitioning. Meanwhile I haven't seen a human face in 2 weeks and haven't interacted with someone my age in 3 months. I guess that is great for true hermits, but I liked SOME interaction.

This also seems to have an indirect impact on my career aspects. Some of the best parts of office was the growth as you worked directly with experts in your domain and seeing how they tick and hearing their war stories. You can hear all that passively in a cafeteria as you're on break. That goes away and I now interact with maybe 5-6 people max per week, and I wonder if I am even growing anymore.

Oh well at least the pay is good.

Prior to Pandemic, hi-tech worker retention rate was 2.5 years in my area (this is not in Bay Area, Seattle, or New York).

People switch jobs frequently is the norm anyway.

That's a really good point. Humans generally don't like big changes, so removing friction to a big change makes it more likely. While remote work might make it a bit easier to fire someone, it totally makes it easier to leave.

Factor in that with the boomers retiring, the workforce is much smaller, especially among those with more experience. Unemployment is expected to stay low for some time (in the US at least), which means workers have more power. This is especially true for work that requires more experience or education. Those roles will be harder to fill overall, and the expected outputs are higher.

As a person working in a fully remote, global company... and as a hiring manager, I can attest to the challenges in hiring and maintaining a remote workforce. Hiring is tough, but keeping employees is also tough... because it is so easy to leave in a time of low unemployment.

> because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.

But.. that's actually great? With more companies accepting remote work as just your average way of doing business means what I can fire my boss too, without breaking a sweat. Because I would have ample opportunities to find another, similar, remote work just easily. Oh, I don't need to take the day off for the interview.

The workers will always lose out because the employer has more power. Accept that reality, and that the simple counter-balance is workers organizing.

[flagged]

How does at will employment work without an organized mafia to negotiate those terms?

It seems like it works quite well for tech.

In what ways?

Compensation and strength of job market? (Yes, even with all these layoffs).

it works because high compensation and strength of job market, not "results in". these (high paid) workers have a lot of power individually which balances against the scale power of the organization. Not so for low skill workers. At will employment will not lead to higher wages for low skill workers. It will lead to fuller employment, more overall wages.

Are you arguing that low-skill workers should then choose to form a union?

I understand why low-skill workers want to form unions, just like I understand how people want to buy gas and drive a 1 ton internal combustion engine around by themselves, it makes their lives better in the short term.

but in that comment I went on to say that the overall (aggregate, total) wages paid by greedy, rapacious capitalists to low-wage workers (taken as a group) will be higher without unions. It's well known that unions get higher wages for their members at the expense of unemployment for their non-members.

I think the right answer is policies that decrease the power of large employers by making sure that they are always competing against other large employers. I don't think there should be 1 Amazon, I think Amazon should be broken into a half dozen Amazons. Bezos would continue to own the same %age of the Amazons as he does of Amazon, so it's fair to him, but Amazon would no longer be a monopsony in the the labor market and the small vendor marketplace, nor have monopoly power for consumers, so fair to everyone else also.

such a hard core market solution as I'm proposing would probably drive wages down, but it would also drive prices down, and driving prices down (or holding back increases, nobody wants deflation) is a really powerful way to increase standards of living

While I understand your argument, and it has some legitimacy, particularly in relation to anti-trust regulation and moving back to actually enforcing the laws, as opposed to what has been happening since the late 1980s.

Low-skill workers only have the power to withdraw their labor (which is their only negotiating leverage) when their labor is required.

As for unions getting higher wages for their members, that's their job (by definition). It's not at the expense of unemployment for their non-members.

The "hard core" market solution you're proposing is what used to be implemented ever since the anti-trust laws and regulations were passed in the early 20th century. Standard Oil was broken up and the companies that exist as a result today (Mobil, Exxon, etc) have all done very well in spite of Standard Oil being split. The same applies to AT&T and IBM (less so, due to their own management) and Microsoft.

> is what used to be implemented

no, anti-trust laws talk about abuse of monopoly power, which can only be established after years of said abuse and which leave many of the negative patterns untouched. I'm talking about using market share itself as the metric

> "hard core" market solution

I call it hard-core because most of the arguments for "free market" solutions wind up protecting large businesses. I'm talking about making sure to subject large businesses to market forces for the benefit of consumers, whose jobs I'm not willing to protect. To put it in vulgar political terms, neither the socialist Democrats nor the capitalist Republicans would support what I'm talking about, that's how you know it's good. And it's more of a thought experiment, it's like saying "I know the answer, carbon capture!" when carbon capture is the unknown hard part, but you have to think this way to achieve a breakthrough. I'm focusing attention on the parts of the market that are failing.

> not at the expense of unemployment

you're writing patiently as if you're teaching me something (which i don't mind, i'm pedantic af, welcome friend), but unions getting higher wages at the cost of higher unemployment is standard econ 101, taught in every class everywhere, except maybe Political Economy where they talk about workers's feelings.

Thanks for that longer (and gracious) explanation.

Upon a more careful re-reading, your post is more clear; I chalk up my misreading to reading and replying while commuting back home from the airport. The fault is in my reading not your writing.

How are Unions "organized Mafia" (btw, Mafia, by definition is "organized crime") yet organizations like the Chamber of Commerce and other "business associations" are not?

Why are businesses allowed to "organize" and "influence politics" (Citizens United decision anyone?) yet when a union does it, it's considered somehow theft from workers and "socialist".

If capitalism is about regulated free markets, then why is a regulated labor market not "free"? Unregulated markets are both anarchic and lead to oligarchic and monopolistic behavior, as can be seen in areas like big tech etc.

Capital "vs" labor is by definition about labor attempting to extract as much of the profit of their labor as they can, while capital will be working to achieve the opposite. To ensure that this is at least managed, a regulated market, with an impartial regulator and legitimate market laws is required.

Here is an example full of answers relating to my comment above:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mafia#:~:text=In%20th....

> I'll contend that while I've been fully taken advantage of remote work ...

I think you meant " fully takING advantafe of remote work ". Not to nitpick. I just genuinely thought you meant you were taken advantage of by your employer.

I took it as a double entendre. We took advantage of the WFH policy and the company also took advantage of us, coz more work got done, since we had nowhere to go.

> No more offices. No more weekly happy hours.

Those sound like benefits to many.

> They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose.

This is only a negative for people who were already making absurdly high incomes in HCOL areas. For many people away from the coasts, salaries are now higher because they have access to the kinds of jobs and companies they didn’t before.

> Don't need to bother with those pesky things called relationships because your boss from 500 miles away can lay off your ass without breaking a sweat.

Has this every not been the case? Besides, there are only two kinds of layoffs. Massive ones that do not take performance into account, and rarely take input from your direct manager about who is going and who is staying. On the other hand, for layoffs in which performance is taken into account, I’m sure many prefer the criteria to be more about their work than how chummy they are with the boss and how well they politick.

I can see how these might be disadvantages for a certain kind of worker, but for other kinds they are huge wins.

“Depress salaries” == “Now the person in the middle of Nebraska can make more than he could make before without moving to California”

Maybe the HN fear of "depress salaries" isn't someone from Nebraska taking Cali tech jobs, but could be most likely a dog whistle for foreigners from abroad taking US tech jobs.

I don't live there anymore but in my home county in Eastern Europe, the WFH boom from 2020 brought in thousands of well paying tech jobs from US companies which might have never arrived if not for Covid. Tech workers there are making bank now, relative to local CoL.

Who knows, maybe this trend will accelerate now that the tap of zero interest money which enabled companie to out-bid each other for SV labor has dried out and many start-up and scale-ups need to actually be profitable for a change, they might look towards skilled remote workers abroad to fill their ranks till the next bull run.

Interesting times ahead indeed.

I 100% think this is the long term play. Once we figure out how to really have "remote only" companies, the "remote" part won't be "remote in the USA" but "remote in some cheap part of the world". We tried this with outsourcing but it failed because we didn't have the "remote" part down... now we do...

As someone that has dealt with local (Australia) and remote (Slovakia, Mumbai, Phillipines, Thailand) outsourcing, the problem is not the individual workers, or even language, time zones etc.

The problem is more about the company/organization that is doing the outsourcing than the outsourced work itself. You have to have a clear definition of what you are trying to outsource. Is it "just coding"? Is it "some design, but not analysis"? Is it "do everything below a certain level of management" (the worst)?

If you don't know what you want other than "cheap" then you won't get either of the other two qualities of "good" or "quick".

Developers aren't fungible, neither are designers, or analysts or architects. About the only people that are fungible and easily replaceable are project managers (sorry, buzzword compliant "product owners" and "SAFe scaled Agile practitioners").

Yes. Agree. The only thing preventing this going all the way is the friction in timezones and difficulty in co-ordination (i.e. still requires someone local to the remote people to manage their work).

Well for my line of work (app dev/cloud consulting) there is lot of face time, video conferencing with clients, travel to client sites, etc.

But also many of our contracts have data governance requirements where you have to be US based and other government contracts require you to be a US citizen.

Non-government, international start-ups won't have any of these restrictions.

I don’t think it’s a dog whistle at all (nor does it need to be).

Drawing from a worldwide pool of capable technologists is pretty obviously the end state and, unless global demand picks up by a factor of over 10x, that will inevitably depress tech salaries in the currently most highly compensated markets (while raising salaries on the other end of the distribution).

Oh hey this is literally me. Started working remote in 2015 and really upped my salary in 2020 working for AWS remotely and then moved to an actual good company. Never had to move to California or Washington.

I actually work for AWS remotely (ProServe).

Sorry to hear that. Haha. Nah, it's very org dependent. A bunch of my team all quit around the same time last year. One of my buddies had been happily there for 6 years.

> they have a wider pool from which to choose

This goes both ways for employer and employee

I think this is true: employees will be able to choose from far more options, and they will have more competition. The first phase of this is competing with anyone in the US, but soon enough companies will be hiring abroad for zoom-based jobs. If a foreign employee can work in a reasonable time-zone, and has great english language skills, what's the difference?

I think you'll see increasing numbers of Canadians working for US companies (that's already happening). Of course that's little different than hiring from areas in the US outside the major hubs. Somewhat lower average salaries, but similar skills and work habits, same time zones, etc.

Expanding further, it's already the case that if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.

You might find someone with 80% of the ability for 60% of the price, or 50% for 25%, and in some cases companies could save a lot that way. But obviously two 50% developers != one 100% developer in output. And just to reiterate, I'm not saying excellent developers don't exist in other countries; they of course do, but you can't generally expect to get them for a fraction of the price. Maybe a slight discount, which would obviously be worth companies pursuing, but not enough to suddenly put US developers out of work en masse. That's already mostly true, and will become entirely true as remote work becomes more the norm. So it will be somewhat good for developers outside the US, and for US companies; I just don't think the change there will be as massive as it might appear.

I also expect on net it will be great for most domestic US developers as well; there may be added competition, but there will also be more flexibility. The one group that I guess will likely lose out are those who really want to live somewhere like San Francisco, as you'll still have the disadvantage of cost of living, but lose the advantage of privileged access to high-paying companies. (Though as a result, those property values will probably come down over time.)

> if you're looking for an international employee with similar skills and capabilities to a domestic one, you're going to end up paying similar to what you would domestically. You're rarely going to find someone that you can pay meaningfully less than you'd pay someone in the US (again, outside of places like the Bay area) who has a similar level of skill and ability.

I know. This is going to sound crazy.

The pay gap is still very much alive. I’ve been hiring internationally for 10 years and salaries in India and Indiana are still very far off.

A little over 10 years ago, when we were getting started, we were good at finding A Players, but paying less (otherwise we couldn’t have existed). Did work for Google, Twitter, Sandisk skunkworks, on basically magic creation. Deep OS work. We hired product builders & former startup CTO’s, engineers & designers & PhD’s, who cared about their craft.

Indiana and India still very different.

Nice, you clearly have more experience with overseas hiring than I do. I've attempted it a few times, but haven't been able to consistently find people who were available and some combination of sufficiently good & inexpensive to make it worthwhile vs hiring domestically (in Canada in my case), given the added challenges of time zones, potential language barriers, etc. I'm sure they're out there, but my impression was that you can't just go and hire an equivalent developer for half the price easily.

Care to share any of your strategies for finding talent and hiring in India?

It will be less stable, but I think I agree with your analysis ( and in real terms, when was it really stable .. 50s? ). Oddly, I think it may only add to the 'Previous team didn't know what they were doing. Fix it.' vicious cycle. In a sense, companies will be re-inventing the big 3 consulting companies.

It is not just just English and skill set that is the issue. In my neck of the woods, I just dealt with otherwise really smart data guy, who was giving me something that clearly did not make sense in the business context - not everything can reasonably be placed in a requirement ( assume earth is not flat ).

Yeah, this sort of thing has been my experience and understanding as well.

I think “soon enough” started more than five years ago and accelerated in the last three.

> They can now depress salaries even further because they have a wider pool from which to choose.

This appears to be the lump of labor fallacy. Other employers are now competing for those workers too!

If that’s the case then why hasn’t the shift happened sooner?

Previous big waves of the shift were referred to as "outsourcing", "offshoring", etc.

They were also 100% cost driven and not value driven. A lot of companies have opened offices in other countries and hired great people, but they focused exclusively on value.

Most companies just looked at the direct cost and went with it. Of course they picked the absolute worst workers and so the whole scheme collapsed.

Covid pandemic proved that most office jobs can be done remotely with little to no loss of productivity.

I would definitely argue a loss of productivity. But those costs are far outweighed by the benefits, such as less overhead, greater hiring radius, and flexibility. Plus a lot of the weaknesses are more managerial than technical, like synchronous vs async tasks and finding more effective ways to measure productivity.

I wonder about this too.

The UK has lower salaries than west coast US and a large pool of suitable workers.

Big tech has a presence but why haven’t they moved their main operations to the UK?

Once you decide to go to "Europe" then the question becomes why the UK and not somewhere vastly cheaper like Romania or Poland. Wages in the UK are lower but wages in eastern Europe are much lower still.

Not as true now as it was even 2 years ago. Slovakian wages are reaching parity with the "West" of Europe, and Romania is climbing as well.

Until the war, Ukraine was also climbing that same ladder. And when the war is over, they will soar. Their skills are at least the equivalent of any developer I've worked with, their language skills are impressive, and their analysis and design skills are as well.

Twitter still makes all employees work at the office….

:)

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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.

This is nonsense. What they're saying is that we need to start designing habitation to be more localized and less dependent on commuting and endlessly expanding suburbia. Suburbs, particularly the US variety (and Australia) are terrible because of the lack of local facilities, hospitality and retail.

Cities need to downsize but at the same time regionalize. Smaller cities with HSR and equivalent will work to reduce the need for individual vehicles, which saves on costs, environment, energy consumption, and people's overall health.

Working in a local community is much better for everyone involved than people spending 1+ hours each way every day to get from their home to their work and back again.

The same applies to retail, hospitality and most other service industries.

Manufacturing (particularly heavy industry) is better to be localized to transport hubs (rail, river, sea ports) because of the tonnage that has to be moved in and out, as well as localizing the polluting and environmental degradation (no one really wants to live next to a steel mill).

The latest CT is that the WEF is trying to somehow lock people into their suburb and restrict freedom of travel. That's complete and utter nonsense.

Everything you said is correct and I would agree with - but under the presumption that the climate emergency is genuine and that the individual contributors in the agencies responsible for the models and predictions have not been compromised, coerced, baited, led by funding into agreeing with corporate and governmental agendas, interests.

Is it not odd that we have traditional liberal activists and corporate/government on the same side also?

I agree wholly with you regarding how it is better for everything to be community based, with people working in a local community, that cities need to downsize, that manufacturing is better to be localized, all of these things move us closer to a much better world and I would even be happy if the government used its power to force the change on the population ... but if you study the groups behind this they are international socialists, the presentations they have given quite clearly outline malicious intentions when you look at other movements and ideas the same groups are lobbying for.

Regarding the WEF point you made. I point you towards the case of Oxford City in the UK , which as of last month has already implemented a 15 minute city without any dialogue with its citizens.

The communist china style tracking camera and permit system has been created in their city and it is likely by next year its citizens will start to be fined 70 pounds sterling whenever they go to a neighboring zone without a permit.

It was reported this week 100 councils (local governmental planning agencies) have signed up to implement this in the UK in their jurisdictions own cities. This is without any dialogue or permission with their citizens.

Does the speed of this being rolled out not frighten you enough to question what is going on? It is such a drastic change. Taking a trip in a car from one part of the city to another is such a small journey, such a small cost to the environment. It is not like a cross country trip, I understand the distances between points in the USA is larger but they are planning this for the cities in the USA too, not longer journeys, but god knows where this will end.

There are different people on this website and they can have different opinions about things

And we can even have somewhat contradictory opinions about things.

E.g. the option for remote work is really nice for many and may be required to be viable in the future... but are we losing some fundamental part of teamwork by leaving the office? And does it really just make us more expendable?

>"but are we losing some fundamental part of teamwork by leaving the office? And does it really just make us more expendable?"

I do not believe I am special in any way but I am remote since 2000 and while working with the clients I often work with teams. At no point I felt like I am loosing some "fundamental part". Maybe because work team is work team and nothing more. I do not consider work as a source of friends even though I have acquired couple this way. Mostly I have friends outside of work.

>but are we losing some fundamental part of teamwork by leaving the office?

In some ways yes. It is much harder to brainstorm through conference calls for example.

>And does it really just make us more expendable?

technically yes. It's very easy to be "forgotten" in a remote setting if your job is isolated out. They won't even have a face to place on someone when it comes to re-orgs.

[dead]

That's right.

The HN Community isn't.

HN isn't a coherent whole with one voice.

And, as a sibling comment pointed out, neither, typically, is any individual contributor. We can even change our opinions.

If people were the same, there would be not as much discussion on this forum.

There are a bunch of different people reacting to a stressful change in economy and its effects on the job market. That's all.

It may be 'easier' to fire people when you don't have to deal with their physical presence, but I doubt that factors much into the decision overall. My bet is that companies are battening down the hatches because they see strong headwinds economically (or are using other layoffs as an excuse to clean house).

Good companies will retain good talent. They won't jettison their valued contributors just to have their competition scoop them up.

The emphasis here is on Good. Bad companies likely will jettison many of their good employees, either by setting bad policies and having them opt out, or by firing them direction because they aren't paying attention. Remote work is one of those factors that some companies are struggling to set policies for.

Unfortunately, there are many 'bad' companies, and many people on HN work for them.

Some companies laying off, the common issue is the appearance of over-hiring like facebook. I know two small companies that are hiring, so what can you conclude? Nothing in general. I think it's mostly just following the herd.

It's difficult for a company to work well when 50% are in office and 50% are remote.

If you can't get enough good employees in office, then it is smarter to go 100% remote as you now have an easier time hiring and working globally.

Different types of workers need different levels of face-to-face interaction.

Marketing teams, creatives and other similar groups need more face-to-face interaction because what they're creating is all about interaction, with the company's customers, their consumers (if not B2C), etc.

Those building the product after the marketing and other designers have created their designs don't require as much F2F time. They need whiteboards and C4 diagrams (in IT at least) when architecting systems, as well as some team F2F for thrashing out system level functionality and how it will be implemented (shared services etc).

But an individual developer, writing code, doesn't need F2F time with anyone. They need the capability to be available (video calls, text chat etc), but it's not an inherent requirement.

> doubt [that lack of physical presence] factors much into the decision overall.

Having done an in-office RIF and a remote-in-COVID RIF, I can confirm that the decisions are made in Spreadsheetville and the actual notifications are different but not different enough to detectably feedback into the plan.

>Which is it?

I think it's fair to say that people would like to work remotely while also not being converted into a commoditized faceless resource; and I think that it's clear to anyone at the moment that we haven't quite worked all the kinks out of total remote work , yet.

An ideal remote environment would be one where the human at the other end of the line is still remembered as being a human and cherished rather than just treated as a gig worker-drone.

That's never going to happen. Most people (maybe not you, you savant) need someone's physical presence to see them as a real person. The phrase "Out of sight, out of mind" did not become irrelevant just because I can email someone across the world.

For the older generation, maybe. For the generation that grew up with online friends who they rarely or never met physically, it's completely normal. Sadly we'll have to wait a while for that generation to reach management age.

> Most people (maybe not you, you savant) need someone's physical presence to see them as a real person.

In that case, I’ll just assume you’re a bot and simply parroting what you’ve been programmed to say.

Try having video calls.

I do, every day. I still don't have an emotional attachment to the people I'm video calling from across the world. The folks nearby? Yes.

[dead]

The hackernews zeitgeist assumes all companies are run by saturday morning cartoon villains, despite being in an industry that is highly privileged at the expense of other possible businesses due to economic policy.

Have to admit, I read this:

> assumes all companies are run by saturday morning cartoon villains

Then took a moment to do a quick mental check, recall faces and dress codes and behaviours, and I could hardly disagree, they are run by cartoon villains!

Both ex bosses of mine and pop CEOs fit the bill to such a degree that it's scary.

Probably in minority here; I currently work remote, but miss going to the office. Will consider non-remote roles in the future.

I've found "At your own discretion" jobs are great. The downside is they can be hard for a company to justify unless the space is being used for other means than just "the occasional office space". I'm "100% remote" but can head in to our main office (just under 2 hours away) any time and if it's a multi-day engagement there is a hotel across the street. Far enough away that I never feel like I have to come in for anything but close enough that if something is better done in person/a fun event I can go there without coordinating flights and a rental or driving all day.

My last job had a similar structure but the office was ~15 minutes away so it was harder to push back on some "well let's just all work on this here together for the next 3 weeks since we're local" type asks and didn't work out as well. I don't mind collaborating but after years of not being used to coming in every day coming in is honestly not much better to me than the idea of "my job requires me to fly out for weeks at a time" type travel (which I've also done before).

> Which is it?

Is the expectation here that "people on HN" are a monolith and only capable of singular thought? Are you suggesting there can't or shouldn't be any room for diversity of thought and debate?

I think comments like yours are interesting. You say people on HN shit on both, pretending you caught the hive-mind in some kind of hypocrisy. I'd bet there are more than two people here that can hold more than two opinions. Why would you expect everyone to be of the same opinion?

And the two extremes don't even cover the whole spectrum of opinions you can have.

I personally like working in the office, I believe humans are social animals that need more than just interaction through voice and crappy video with a bad angle, yet I hate the commute. So I'm completely fine with the hybrid approach we have right now at my company. Although I would understand if for cost-savings they'd make us 100% remote.

Working from home where I'm mostly independent is great, I can concentrate much better. Working from home on something that needs collaboration is hard. Meetings in Teams are psychologically exhausting. You can't see the reactions of people when you present something. This feedback is necessary.

Maybe if we had some kind of VR/metaverse kind of thing it would help, but it would need to convey facial micro-expressions in real-time. Audio would need to be placed appropriately in the room.

Like for VR meetings to make sense it shouldn't be necessary to mute your microphone. The app would need to make it sound like you're in a room together and multiple people can be distinguished properly by ear.

You can have a fix desk for employees who want to be on site, and have a bunch of "free desks" for the remote ones who want to come to the office.

Sometimes it's nice to be remote, sometimes it's nice to be in the office. Some people like it 100% remote, other 100% on site.

It's almost as if... employees want choice even within their company?

Not to mention being remote and caring for employees are not mutually exclusive factors.

HN isn't one person.

It's a community of individuals having a debate.

But I get your point! :-)

It does seem that way...

You know that crowds can have multiple different opinions that are conflicting at the same time.

Wait for it… even single person can hold 2 or more conflicting opinions or views at the same time. Fun part is they also can and will use them in discussions as they see fit.

There is no law or logic involved.

> Look, you can’t have it both ways.

“You” can, especially when “you” are a diverse group of different people, not a single entity. But this isn’t even a “both ways” situation.

> People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don’t allow work from home, or require at least a couple days in the office. Then a company says it’s going entirely remote (not including the layoff context) and people shit on that.

You can, in fact, with perfect consistency criticize people for not allowing something while also criticizing other people for forcing that same thing and not allowing the opposite.

It's not a contradiction to say I want to work remotely and I don't want the company to use it against me. A company can choose to go remote for good and bad reasons. If they do it for bad reasons, they get shit on. In the context of layoffs, it's not irrational to consider the motive might be bad.

HN is not one person. Different people can have different opinions on this matter.

Perhaps "is a company a good employer" is a multi-dimensional thing.

This person does not represent HN. They can have their opinion.

I know. It's almost like HN isn't a monolith and people reach for the "comment" button more often when they are critical than supportive.

why can't it be both ways? neither of those things is absolutes. you can have shitty companies that want to treat employees like temporary resources and may use remote work to streamline the facilitation of that. you can also have companies that treat employees well and don't see the need to force them into the office unnecessarily. both can happen. we don't have to think about things singularly.

Its almost as if all decisions have pros and cons, and there is no magic one viewpoint that captures all the consequences of such an action.

The layoffs are relevant context for how people are going to interpret the policy change though.

I think thats it is two separate groups piping up with two different opinions on remote work.

People shit on companies for talking one way and acting another. It's simple.

There are different people on hackernews though.

Perhaps it's not the same people...

Well, you can have it both (or even more) ways: no matter what companies do, someone will crap on them! This can be universal (all companies) or particular (e.g., the company that overbilled me).

And that's w/o going into politics )(if you do, leftists will jump up and crap on capitalism).

Welcome to the crapnet.

You claimed: we must have it one way or the other. This is false. Game theory says you are wrong and has proofs that you are wrong in the form of proofs of mixed strategies being optimal equilibrium strategies. In these strategies we have the assumption of having it both ways - the probabilities have to add one, but they don't have to be binary.

Lets use a much simpler decision problem to show that you are wrong to not think of things as happening in both ways.

Consider rock paper scissors.

If I want to pick rock, because I'm worried about them picking paper, it doesn't mean I can't be wary of scissors, because I'm worried about them picking rock. For, were I to not be wary of them picking scissors, they could always pick scissors, and therefore, because I had it only one way, I would be exploitable. So now I have to be wary of them picking scissors, but what if I am only wary that they pick scissors? Then I will now play rock. Yet now they can play paper. So what if am I only wary they play paper? Then I must play scissors. Yet if I do, they play rock. So what if I am only wary they play rock? Then I must play paper. Yet now if I do, they can play scissors.

So actually, it isn't that you can't have it both ways, but that you must have it all ways. Anything else and you can't reason properly about the expectations.

> People on HN are always talking badly about companies that don't allow work from home

This is also false. People on Hacker News are not always doing this, they are sometimes doing this, and then sometimes doing other things. There are also many people on Hacker News and each commenter may have a different opinion. Some people on Hacker News prefer working from home. Some people on Hacker News do not prefer working from home.

I feel that you are trying too hard to set up a 'it has to be one way' dichotomy to make your decision problems simpler, but it isn't actually true that making your problems simpler and easier to reason about means that you are doing more correct reasoning. Demanding that others simplify their thinking in a similar way is a request, not for correct thinking, but for use of a time savings technique that you prefer.

Being very clear on that will probably make it more obvious to you that what you are requesting is not as necessary as you seem to think it is: for he calculated his expectation with regard to how exploitable this could make us, then gave you that expectation. This cost you almost nothing to incorporate into your own estimates, so on the whole, it saved you time, at the cost of his time, a cost which you are not paying, but which you benefit from in expectation through correction of the estimates of your faster to calculate yet more exploitable false dichotomy.

This site is a bit: "4 Polacks, 6 opinions" -Frank Sobotka

> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

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

Suppose you've got an average, B-grade engineer who has been doing this job for 3 years. They should have all the technical knowledge tuned to do this job, connections to all the right people they need to work with, and all kinds of institutional memory about why everything is the way it is.

You let that person go, and bring in an objectively better, A-grade worker. It's going to take months to find that person, more months to train them, and still more time before they're fully operational the way the last employee was. And you still have risks, that they're really a C but they talked a good game in the interview. Or they're not going to be satisfied doing this job for long. Or they're not even going to take the offer when you make it.

And yet, in my experience the average company won't try very hard to keep people. They'll give them mediocre raises for far less than they'd be willing to hire someone into that position for, and do very little otherwise to try to keep them happy until they have one foot out the door. I don't get it, it doesn't make sense from the coldest and most calculating perspective I can give it, but with some notable exceptions it seems that's just how it works.

This really resonates with me. I had a solid team of what you’d call B-grade engineers for years, but for various reasons most of the team left over the past couple years and were replaced with C’s.

Feature velocity has mostly ground to a halt under the mountain of technical debt that the B-team accumulated. I’ve made my displeasure known, but my company doesn’t seem to have any real interest in keeping me.

Yup. Pension is dead and no company on the high up business ends sees the value in labor, even if the people who "survive" the layoffs feel the most heat. They'd rather have a revolving door of new people they give inflation raises to than offer to keep valuable talent and in-knowledge. Because if one person gets a 30% promotion I guess that means EVERYONE will get one, and that's not good for a coporation.

Yes, exactly, employees may not actually be like virtual servers that you can spin up and shut down at will, but some employers will think of them that way.

Some employers? That seems to be the norm from what I've seen. Team leaders usually know full well how hard it is to find good new people and get them trained, just like the previous comments here say, but somehow upper management never seems to understand this at all. I guess they think that's lower-level management's and HR's problem to solve.

>but some employers will think of them that way

Employers quite clearly already think that way.

Closing all offices enables GitHub to hire in cheaper geographies. Seems that the San Francisco headquarter was their only real office anyway,and I estimate approx 400 GitHubbers were working from there (55000 sqft office space, tech typically uses 150 sqft per employee). Gradually re-hiring those in cheaper geographies plus reduction of perks can mean quite significant savings and is another stab at Silicon Valley.

This is exactly right. All the people clamoring for remote work are asking for us all to get paid less, or nothing at all because the job went to Europe or Asia.

Yeah, bullshit. Maybe you didn't live through all the panic about offshoring in the 1990's, but all of our jobs would have been sent to Southeast Asia if they could have been by now. Remote changes nothing. They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time.

I am not as optimistic based on recent moves that seem to be intended to rein the employees in and mollify investor class, but I agree that if they could, they would have done it already. Simple reality is that it is genuinely hard to do stuff well across time zones. Add to this kids and demand for work life balance and it gets impossible fast. Companies would love 'tried and ready' person, but.. that tends to come with age and age demands some modicum of consideration; one way or another.

Auth0 (Okta) has quite a few Latin American (Argentina) and Spain workers. Don't know if that is growing or not.

> They still can't fill positions, and the dwindling population of the active workforce due to COVID will ensure that employees are in the driver's seat for a long, long time.

There are hundred thousands of jobless hi-tech professionals, let's see if this state stay for long.

Yeah, no kidding. First job I had, worked there 2007-2010, we had an office in India where a huge amount of our engineering staff was based (most of the time I was there, fully half of our entire headcount were in the India office, and the India office only had engineering people while the US had every department).

In 2016-2021, I worked at another company that had an office in the Philippines where most of our junior employees worked. In fact, at one point before covid, they started rapidly hiring Tier 1 NOC staff in the Philippines and announced they would no longer hire Tier 1 positions elsewhere and would phase out the US-based Tier 1 staff via attrition... and then a few months later (still before covid) all the remaining US-based Tier 1 staff got unceremoniously laid off out of nowhere.

Mass outsourcing has been happening since long before covid and remote work took off.

I did. We'll see.

> asking for us all to get paid less, or nothing at all because the job went to Europe or Asia.

You don't think it might be reasonable for the term "us all" to include people in Europe or Asia?

It is. Sloppy language. Should have said people working in bay area offices for FAANG companies.

Y'know, some time I'd really like to see a poll about where people on HN are located, because honestly, I doubt more than a modest plurality are actually in the Bay Area, or working for FAANG.

And yet, it's generally so easy to detect the ones that are, because so many of them have the same attitude you do: that you're the only ones who matter on this site, or even the only ones who matter at all.

It gets to be pretty disgusting at times.

- A programmer who's never come anywhere near San Francisco

YCombinator was founded here. Many VCs are here. Google, Facebook, others are headquartered here or Seattle. There's definitely a Bay Area bias.

Regardless, I'm sorry you find it disgusting, and that you drew the inference that I think nobody else matters. I was simply pointing out that not returning to bay area offices is not consequence free.

I have been hiring very capable people in other countries at my startup. It's not just hypothetical to me that people in other regions will be the beneficiaries of this movement.

I will take “getting paid less” in exchange for me living where I want to live over having to live on the west coast any day.

I couldn’t have had the 3200 square foot house built in the burbs in 2016 (when I was making $135K) in any place close to a tech hub.

Now I work remotely for $BigTech and I can live anywhere. I live in a resort area in Florida half the year and fly around the US the other half and rent my place out (professionally managed). I actually downsized and paid about the same for where I live now as I did in 2016 and no state income taxes.

I’ve been pricing out a truck+trailer combo to work remote and see North America.

I’m starting to get serious about it and it’s really exciting.

Remote offers so many possibilities for a more enriching life. I’d for sure take a 20 or even 30% pay cut (to <$100k)to enable this, easy!

I wouldn’t go that far. My goal was to still live as if I was making the same thing I made before I came to BigTech

And for context: my budget at 49 years old could easily be supported by what a returning intern got at my current company. We aren’t talking about a lot of money by tech standards.

Housing: we were paying around $3500 a month all in - mortgage, utilities, yard, pest control etc. When we stay in our “Condotel” between October and mid March we are paying less than $3000 all in, the mortgage + HOA (CDD) thst covers everything else including utilities, access to three pools, a lake, a gym, three restaurants onsite, a running trail etc all included.

Our budget for hotels is about $3500/month - midrange Hilton extended stays also with gyms and pools.

-ground transportation - we had one car with a car note, that and maintenance, gas and car insurance for two cars came up to around $1000/month. We sold both of our cars. That’s now our Uber/occasional rental car budget.

- flights - before our “vacation budget” was around $8000 a year. Now that’s our domestic one way plane budget for the year.

I looked at a budget from 2016 when I was making $135K (less than a returning intern offer at my current job and I was 43 at the time), and my yearly spend has only increased by the $8000 flight budget.

Now “my“ budget does include my wife’s “allowance” that she was providing for herself when she was working part time in the school system. We agreed for her to stop working post Covid and when I got my current job.

Also, I give myself an “allowance” too that’s actually less than hers.

Those in Europe and Asia are asking to be paid more. Things will level out, like they did with offshoring.

>This is exactly right. All the people clamoring for remote work are asking for us all to get paid less, or nothing at all because the job went to Europe or Asia.

This wont happen in the united states because of timezones. UK time is 8 hours off PST Indian is 13 off.

SA is really the only viable alternative.

Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

Good.

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

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

This makes it easier for them to fire you and everyone else. Why, even as a contractor, would you be ok with that? Niceties or no you are weakening your own position and the value of you labor.

Why should a company be forced to continue to pay for employees they aren't in need of?

Because other countries have decided that "we need to make our quarterly earnings look good" isn't a good enough reason to can half your staff over. If you fire an employee at anytime it's just unpredictable (and inefficient) contract work.

Where did I say companies should be forced to pay for employees they don't need? I didn't say that.

What I did say is that this is yet another move by business to pay you less and offer you less security for your labor - because let's be honest, that's what this is. Companies will go with the lowest bidder they think can get the job done. Do you really want to have a race to the bottom for the price of your labor?

And for that matter, how do you think unions, tenure, weekends, 40 hr workweeks, PTO, sick leave, health benefits, and a whole other myriad of benefits for your labor came about? I guarantee you its certainly NOT because people in the past viewed their labor value as purely transactional to themselves and their employers.

You as an employee have far more to lose.

I'm not proposing any changes in legislation to make it easier to fire anyone.

What I am advocating for is for people here to see reality more clearly.

What you're doing is playing Devil's advocate?

C'mon now: "to see reality", "not proposing to make it easier to fire people".

Why can't the working class demand changes and influence the reality?

Coming from a contractor... yeah, really...?

I want to work for a company that’s financially strong (or at least profitable). If that means they sometimes fire people, that’s ok. I want my “don’t fire them” to be based on a premise that I’m creating much more value for them than I cost. That’s a stable situation for all parties, short and long term.

It doesn’t work like that though for publicly traded companies. Even if you bring in more revenue that they be are paying you, it can be attractive to fire you to juice the stock price on Wall Street.

I guess you never worked for a company that got record earnings after laying off 10000 employees.

I don't want my company in the red, but I also don't want to feel like I'm dangling on a cliff. There's a reason most companies stopped doing stack rankings.

To take the lucrative job someone less skilled was holding.

He's hurt he didn't get the same benefits as full-time. That's why.

> Acting personally surprised or offended or hurt when a business makes a business decision is not good for you. The sooner people accept and realise this the better.

Exactly, which is why labour of all classes and types should organize and gain power against businesses. Too bad the labour movement was killed decades ago.

Actually, if you accept to work for free, a good business decision would be to stop paying you.

Would you act personally surprised or offended or hurt if your company made that business decision?

That would be a terrible business decision, because the company would have no employees.

You missed part of the idea: "if you accept to work for free".

The parent was saying (if I understood correctly): "stop complaining, you should accept the business decision, because that's what a company does: optimize the profit without caring about how the employees feel".

I was just saying that as an employee, you have the right to negotiate your working conditions. If you accept all the "business decisions" because they help the company make more profit, then they will stop paying you. That would be completely rational as a business decision.

If I accepted to work for free, I would be absolutely fine with the company taking me up on the offer. I'd be shocked if they didn't.

> Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

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

Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

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

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

If software worked the way managers and business like to imagine it does - define requirements, build app, step away - then this model could work. But we all know that's almost never the case.

> It'll be interesting to see if more industries are able to adopt a similar model.

If the US offered some sort universal healthcare this would be much easier to see happen. UH would also be a boon for small business.

Honestly I couldn't tell you what capacity I needed from my reports on a time horizon of even 1 month. Sure we do planning, but it's always wrong.

> Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs.

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

Exactly. My impression is that in very large orgs the first couple levels of management normally find out about layoffs a couple hours before they have to deliver them. Both to keep the news under wraps and to avoid personal bias, how many and who is usually a decision taken by directors up and HR.

My first instinct was that this model wouldn’t work because employees need a lot more context/onboarding than servers.

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

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

> but I guess there’s a decent business in trying to build the analogous technology for “spinning up and shutting down” employees.

It’s called contract employment.

It works a bit differently if your servers spend 3 months spinning up to speed.

Dealing with Kubernetes is “painless”?

But it’s not the infrastructure that takes time. It’s the business context, the knowing how to navigate the code and the organization to get things done. The “favor economy” goes a long way in business.

It’s painless compared to trying to do the same thing without it.

But yes, that’s essentially what I mean. Infrastructure is easy. What technology (in the broad sense) can help can you quickly spin up a worker who has context, can navigate the organisation and can be productive. Maybe it’s not solvable, but probably it is.

Well, you know before K8s people just connected to shared resources in a dev environment.

I don’t want my employment to have any nonsense like loyalty or family or whatnot. Pay me to do work and when you don’t want me to do work I’ll find someone else to pay me to do work for them.

100% remote has become a requirement for me.

I think assuming that people will associate remote-only with layoff-eagerness is probably too pessimistic of a take.

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

I associate “having a job” with prospect of “being laid off” and plan accordingly.

If it enables further specialization that can be a good thing, it's often awkward when companies try to wring out some extra utility from people who really aren't well suited for the other task. (Having people do such things occasionally anyway even if poorly, like devs briefly fielding tier 1 support, can be useful for empathy building at least.) The infatuation with combining dev and QE into a combined hybrid role especially comes to mind. (Though I do think it's at least possible there for the majority to be 'good enough' crossing back and forth that it's more or less worked out, and there are enough generalists, but when you see a specialist in one forced to do the other not nearly as well, it feels like a waste.)

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

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.

Totes. I can’t remember a single remote colleague from pre Covid days. Either they were slackers so I didn’t associate with them, or they were usually given the work nobody wanted to do and wasnt high priority (but still needed). And they usually preferred to solo content / play single player, then be part of a raiding party trying to clear challenging content. So it was a different attitude. I’m sure there are excellent remote colleagues but I personally didn’t have that experience.

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

uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers

We are all cattle, not pets.

I doubt in office staff are more valued by companies than remote staff. If the company is moderately large then you will not be any more visible than a remote worker.

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

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

Sure we are, and aggregates in fact, not individual figures.

I'll never work for a "non-remote" company ever again. Period.

> 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.)

Remote means they trust their employees to perform without physical eyes on them. "Open office" layout is designed to have eyes on your screen providing constant pressure to actually work, nothing else.

Market currently says that employees pay to work remote. When I was shopping around for jobs recently, every offer I got for remote work was less than a similar in-person job. At my current job, I got a pay cut for moving out of the Bay Area (worth it), and my manager said he's only ok with this because I'm a very active worker.

Open offices were designed to minimize the space per employee.

A "happy side effect" is that it made it easier for micro-managers to micro-manage.

In my humble opinion open offices were designed so that employees would self police each other in order to minimize the need to micro-manage. If this is unethical is another matter , considering that most people are too lazy to work on hobbies outside of work and they prefer to be slobs watching TV... not much would get done leaving most people to their own devices in private offices....

Regarding the open office ... Everyone can see your computer screen. At any moment someone can be watching what type of face you're making and if you are working hard or dozing off.

Everyone is scared of raising their voice or talking in case you disturb others or others hear you.

Everyone can see when you arrive and what time you leave, what you wear.

Now if we lived in a land of plenty and profit did not matter, then it would be tragic that people are stuck in that hellish environment instead of having their own private office and peace of mind.

However.. when you consider why people do not have hobbies and are lazy... it becomes quite tragic in the here and now... because you have to think of Schools in our society and are they really for the benefit of children or to train them to work and to demotivate them towards life itself ?

People are forced to regurgitate things in a depressing, boring and oftentimes hostile environment (in the sense of their future being on the line if they do not submit to this torture) and in a place that resembles prison blended with an open office... from the age of five ... starting off fun with plenty of toys and play time in kindergarden club ... for most of their childhood becomes increasingly horrible when they are stuck in the grind. Does your own experience not make you feel rage at the time you lost ?

The tragedy of human effort as a whole is that 90% of corporate jobs in their current form are designed to exist in this way simply as a way to put humans into a hellish environment five days a week which they have been trained to accept and even expect all with plausable deniability for the elites who consider us nothing but their cattle. They made us slaves that compete against each other for them and police each other into doing it.

Our open office shows that it's not about space. There's still a lot of space between desks, enough to have cubicles. There are several empty seats even. The rest of the office has tons of barely-used employee space, like big table tennis rooms and open seating. The desks are always arranged in a way that the screens are facing everyone walking by.

To put it another way, I can just take my laptop and work in a common area with a wall behind me, and I get more space and privacy. That's what I do. I'm not slacking, I just don't like eyes on my screen at all hours and people constantly interrupting me.

Five years from now, I think we will not see "remote only" for a large company and think "ooh, they value their employees I guess", but rather, "uh oh, they like to think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

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

Perhaps, but nothing I have ever heard anyone say about the downsides of remote work comes anywhere close to the upsides: e.g. the vastly superior quality of life you get when your job is essentially just a handful of apps on a computer in your house and can be turned on and turned off instantly, and the ability to concentrate on meaningful work tasks in a quiet environment that is under your control and design.

> Closing all offices, I have to say, makes it way easier to do more layoffs.

Particularly of the people responsible for managing physical offices.

The bigger thing I think is offshoring

(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.

Still worth not being stuck in traffic between 5 to 10 hours every week.

> think of their employees as being like virtual servers, easy to spin up and easy to shut down

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

Seeing as we are predicting the future, I'm more concerned about AI driven "development" then I am remote work finally becoming a stable, ubiquitous thing.

Sounds more like it's just easier to use favoritism that's not based on job performance when doing layoffs if you are face-to-face with these folks on a regular basis.

> easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity".

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

Online employees OTOH are easier to organize, unionize, make a fuss when having massive layoffs etc. Hard for companies to hide their digital footprints as well

disagree. if you're remote then i can find someone else on the other coast, in georgia or alabama, or india, who will do your job, usually cheaper.

if you're high-end FAANG tier talent, different story, but most of us are replaceable. that means most of you reading this -- and all of the recent layoffs just underscore that.

As someone who got my first, current and only job at a FAANG working remotely in GA, I declined the chance to be interviewed for a job that would have required me to relocate. I would have made probably $100K more than I was making as a senior enterprise dev.

Instead, the recruiter recommended I apply for another role that was more in my wheelhouse anyway that paid $60-$75k more.

As someone in Georgia who was both one of the first ten employees for a remote FAANG office and also a co-founder of a remote office for an SV unicorn, who got paid more or less what his contemporaries on the west coast did, I'd say you're about 20 years behind the times and a bit off about compensation.

What if I am in Georgia?

As you said in your example having to say it to your face is not really a barrier to firing anyway. We are virtual servers to them, no matter rank or position.

Makes it easier to find a new job for the employee too if you can interview without leaving your desk.

With the popularity of GitHub CoPilot, in a way most GitHub employees already are virtual servers.

Elon's response to this comment: "Hold my beer"

> 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"

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

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

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

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

> If your employees are going to be pictures on your screen anyway, might as well pick ones that worker harder and complain less.

Well, naturally, if that’s the all-else-equal trade that’s on offer, they’d be foolish to not take it.

Of course, the problem is that the trade is on offer at all.

In the antiquated view that the government exists for the protection of the people, rather than to coddle corporations and sacrificing at the altar of competitiveness, it would be simply shut down.

If the antiquated view is that people in one country don’t have to compete in a global marketplace but rather are owed a higher-paying job by virtue of birthplace, I’m OK with the new view (even though I had the good fortune to have that birthplace).

Honestly the latter seems better. Unless it’s my own company I want to turn up do work go home. No more.

> easy to spin up and easy to shut down the moment you don't need to pay for that capacity

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

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.

Any reason why you saw the need to post this exact comment twice?

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.

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.

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

Oh for sure it doesn't make any sense, and is driven solely by the inertia of already having the office space. You'd let it go over time as leases lapse until you're down to just a tiny amount that's facing high utilization.

I'd be interested what the financial analysis looks like leasing or owning hubs vs a cadence of offsites annually remote first orgs usually hold, considering meeting space + hoteling for staff during the meet. I'll chip in for this analysis and blog post!

That sounds like an interesting analysis, but I'm curious if this is one of those moments where economics around it will be deeply shifting over the next few years and any analysis will likely have to adjust frequently.

For instance, even before the remote work shift in 2020 many cities were heavily competing on conference and hotel space allocations for an interesting variety of economic reasons (tourism dollars that float alongside, for instance). As more "corporate Downtown" downsizes their office footprints to go more remote, some of that real estate inventory is going to go to apartments and condos, but also I would expect that there would be just as much pressure to convert it to hotels and conference space and WeWork-style hoteling office space.

I wonder if that's going to snowball into dirt cheap conference prices in a growing list of cities. Especially if you start to factor in non-traditional "hub" cities (especially those non-traditional for tech). I've heard that's an appeal of Denver, Colorado as an annual onsite retreat city for remote first orgs as it has a large conference and hotel inventory that still has some very cheap periods outside of the usual tourist periods. I can point out that cities like Louisville, KY and Indianapolis, IN have massive inventories of hotel and conference (and exposition) space with some incredibly cheap calendar windows and still heavily competing among each other for more hotel/conference inventory every year. (I can also suggest which of those two cities in particular has better tourism options, but that may as much be hometown bias, so I'll save it.)

I have been to some fun offsites in Puerto Vallarta. I imagine other Mexican / central American towns/resorts are also available. It was cheap compared to a US city, everyone could fly there quickly and you could hang around as a tourist by booking FTO afterwards and delaying your flight back. (company didn't care if you picked a cheaper flight home a week or two later when expensing).

I'll also point out that Louisville has amazing whiskey distilleries downtown, the "urban bourbon trail". Great for hashing out tech and product disagreements!

Most employers provision ~100sq/ft per employee. In SF real estate goes for $50-$70 per sq/ft per month. Obviously there’s negotiating that happens.

You could do a lot of travel with a 5-7k budget per month.

There are a ton of variables- agree more analysis is needed.

Office rentals are quoted at dollars per square foot per year so divide that number by 12 and you realize it's not that large after all.

My understanding is that's kind of a regional thing. California markets typically quote $/sf/month and pretty much the rest of the US does $/sf/year. Too easy to confuse. Been a while since I was in that game though.

But yes, you're right that typical high rise office space in the bay is around $50-80/sf/year or $4.50-7/sf/mo. Or $450-700/mo per employee at 100 sf per employee.

Could rent it as co-working space on the rest of the days

> 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".

Provided employee productivity is the same (or better) this model still has Zendesk ahead. It doesn't really matter if utilization is low - if you've closed 10% of your offices you're paying 10% less rent than you were before.

Would there be opportunities for further efficiency by fully closing them and renting space a few times a year? Possibly, yes. But that doesn't mean the current model isn't an improvement on the previous one.

Depends, already years ago there was a hub-n-spoke-like model for office buildings where you had smaller offices for smaller companies that had the ability to temporarily rent the larger "shared" areas of the building.

It didn't really take off afaik, but with more bigger and stable tenants making a larger bulk of these it might actually take off a bit as a model.

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

This is where co-working space (WeWork?) would work well. I just signed a 3 months contract for my team to meet at co-working place as needed to kickstart a project which in person meeting is important.

It also makes sense as a hedge if the WFH trend fizzles out.

It won't fizzle out, if the 15-minute city plans are anything to go by: work global, live local.

[dead]

Well, you were paying for it before. Obviously it’s not a financial burden, or the company would have been unviable even before the pandemic.

If you spend 10M/annum on salaries, is your 1M/annum for an office really a big burden?

Officies, especially the great ones (as in also very expensive) create an irrational emotional attachment and are very hard to downsize on them without impacting morale.

Not true! I worked at what some would consider one of the top offices (Dropbox). They went remote and the polling was something like 70% support 30% oppose. There were some vocal supporters of in-office (mostly due to the perks like food) but they gave a generous stipend instead to satisfy most people.

I find I work better in an office myself... been remote for about 3 years now, and I've gotten used to it. I miss lunch with coworkers, etc... and some of the more spontaneous discussions don't happen nearly as much... Also, I like a relatively short commute (around 30m) long enough to clear the mind before/after work.

Same.

But I used to have a walking commute, which I also miss. Certainly I wouldn't miss a commute longer than 30 minutes. And I'd probably miss it less if it were in an office park somewhere, rather than a city I could walk to lunch at various places.

But yeah, I have a remote job because that's the job I have that I'm well-suited for that was available. (And sure, ability to work from one 1 or 2 days a week or as needed would certainly be convenient regardless). But I don't actually prefer working remotely, and also think there are real losses to quality of collaborative work, as well as quality of life. I know this is heretical to say these days in these circles.

It's not like everyone is the same. Having the freedom to work from home (or anywhere) whenever you need or want to is amazing. Working in the office to brainstorm, see friends, get a change of pace or scenery is also great. Commutes are killer when they're long and you have little choice but to do it.

For me, work environment makes a huge difference.

I work like crap in cubicle farms and typical corporate offices. I feel like I'm on display.

I work best in a private office, with a door that closes, a window that looks out on nature, and a very large whiteboard. Ideally, I'd like my team members have similar ones.

Home is in between.

I can work much longer hours if I can:

- do basic basic bodily functions (stretching, eating, drinking, scratching, a short power nap, etc.)

- change work positions (e.g. lie down with a laptop)

- make noise (phone calls, music, etc.)

- have my papers and books spread out as I see fit

... and so on.

I have never seen a tech firm where I was comfortable in the office, and it's especially hard in places like SFO/BOS/NYC/etc. where square feet cost so much.

My past few jobs weren't with tech firms, and I really enjoyed working in proper offices.

It’s disturbing to think that people think human connection is irrational. I guess y’all forgot that that was how labor unions were formed.

Most of the history of labor unions involved meeting in secret in venues outside of work's control. Very few labor unions were ever formed in the halls of an office building.

Also, human connnection isn't irrational, but expecting all or most of your human connections to come from your job may be.

"Officies, especially the great ones (as in also very expensive) create an irrational emotional attachment "

I was responding to that part. Office create a rational connection in an irrational setting.

My grandfather and most of my great uncles were coal miners in Shamokin, Pennsylvania. They all talked about unions and striking in the mines. And they formed close bonds which made going on strike much easier as well as created a huge social bond when they where striking supplying each other with food and pirated coal.

Ok that might have been poorly worded on my end.

The irrational attachment I was talking about is about having a large, status-symbol office with ~20% average occupancy. Downsizing to a smaller office harms morale even though most people work most of the time at home, yet they feel attached to almost always empty office, that's the irrational/sentimental part for me.

Having recently spent a few weeks in large, quite nice, but nearly empty offices (because I wanted to work in office for a change, but most of my cow orkers had other plans), I realized that holding on to oversized offices can backfire, because as nice as the space is, it felt somewhat demoralizing after a while to be nearly alone in such a vast building.

It seems like the thing to do is to downsize offices until they correctly meet usage. So, take your number of employees, multiply by percentage that usually comes into the office, add a buffer for growth, and have an office for that.

Commercial leases are usually multi year affairs, so difficult to titrate this ratio.

I'm not sure human connection is an equal comparison with offices. There's plenty of human connection, both in person and not, to be had with coworkers without centralized offices.

Office is where people used work, it is not a monument which I think many here seem to make it so

If no one is working there anywhere it doesn’t need to exist

It's not that the human connection is immoral, it's just that paying rent and heating for a pretty empty office space doesn't make much sense. As long as there is sufficient space for all the employees that want to go to the office, being against downsizing doesn't make much sense.

human connection to a workplace is why unions formed? I thought it was the hours, dangerous working conditions, and unlivable pay.

What is needed is something like WeWork for large office gatherings. Something between a WeWork and a hotel conference center. The former is not really made for big meetings. The latter is either very expensive, too large or too small. You need a space for 10-200 people to meet and collaborate... not a conference center.

A space for 100-200 people sounds a LOT like a hotel conference center. They are very flexible spaces.

Almost every hotel has some kind of conference center. You can absolutely rent a conference center for 10 people for a week in any city in america.

and big conference centers are often highly booked and expensive; random hotels are often very cheap and easy to pull together with a couple of weeks notice. quality varies, but shop around.

source: wrangled a few impromptu "conferences" at a local hotel near data centers.

Doesn't that mean they still pay for the real estate? I wonder how viable it is to keep that cost on the books for ad-hoc usage.

They were locked into long term leases anyway: https://storeys.com/shopify-the-well-toronto-office-space-su...

That seems alluring. I wonder how large of a percentage of employees would, if prompted directly, opt to have company funds directed to have "ports" in major cities, if it was entangled with their salary.

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

As someone who goes in almost every day (I live close to my office and I enjoy getting out of the apartment). I wouldn't give up $600/mo for this, because management will never use that money for team events and travel. My team is spread out all across the country and we were told quarterly travel is no issue to all meetup in one of the cities that have an office. That went right out the door as soon as the economy went down. However, I can promise you that you wouldn't see that $600/mo back when you didn't get to travel.

I think this will be the new version of "free lunch" that tech companies offer. Come work for X, we pay for quarterly travel to meetup with your remote coworkers!

Except that's a false dichotomy and that money would go to the shareholders instead.

Why would it? Even in the most cynical business sense, a business will spend as much money on employees as they must. Again, assuming maximal cynicism, they won't care if it's salary or "ports", as long as it's the most effective buck they can spend (think ROI).

What is effective in attracting employees depends, at least partly, on what employees want. That might be either some amount of money into ports or more salary. Paying shareholders more will not attract employees.

Not me. Show me the money.

Yea a lot of companies have done this to great effect - but I am curious to see what happens when lease renewal time comes. Paying for all that office space to remain ~empty 95% of the time does not look good on a budget.

That had been GitHub's model for their SF HQ office, more or less. Some local people used it as their daily office, but there seemed to always be a mini-summit or get together of remote folks happening each week.

There’s actually a word for that: Decentralized decision making. Where you don’t need to physically be in the same room or even in the same country to have a fruitful discussion

Sure. Sounds nice. Wonder why they dont open more of them.

[dead]

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.

Is this GitHub acting independently or is it Microsoft informing them that they needed to lose 10% but they could do it on their own time frame?

The fact they're closing all offices and switching to fully-remote suggests it was Github's decision. Microsoft doesn't seem pro WFH

A bunch of my former co-workers at MSFT are working from home 100% of the time. Maybe it is a per organization thing.

Satya proudly announced WFH as a thing you could do around mid pandemic, then it was bastardized as it went down the orgs.

Some are 100% wfh, vast majority is some arbitrary %.

Can confirm it heavily depends on org.

In my case, I only go to office 1 day a week (to talk to people irl), and in my team only very few people go everyday, everyone else hovers between 20% to 100% wfh.

Looking at the CEO's statement it seems the final layoffs aren't even finalized yet.

> Unfortunately, this will include changes that will result in a reduction of GitHub’s workforce by up to 10% through the end of FY23. A number of Hubbers will receive notifications today, others will follow as we are re-aligning the business through the end of FY23.

This is the exact same message Microsoft CEO said in his message. So yes MSFT is directing these layoffs.

Wonder what teenagers these days think of when you call someone a "hubber"

Urban Dictionary has a pile of different definitions, many of which are quite unique. [1] I'm curious if you're thinking of a particular one?

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hubbers

GitHub has been remote first forever tho. Microsoft buying them can’t change that without fundamentally breaking the teams.

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.

Yeah I don't think github was remote-first when it started.

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).

Oh interesting! Thanks for clarifying. I knew there was an office like a decade ago but I guess I forgot how old Github is!

I think it’s something to celebrate. It’s the best case scenario when you’re acquired by a megacorp.

Agreed!

Fortune now confirming: https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-laying-off-10-of-st...

>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

I'm not kidding, one of the reasons I left my last job was when our parent company forced Outlook, Sharepoint, and Teams on us (vs. Google mail, Google Drive, and Slack). That change on its own isn't the worst thing of course, there were other reasons why I was considering leaving, but it was definitely one of the last straws.

Those MS solutions are just worse than the competition, and getting frustrated at your bugged technology because the parent company decides it can save some money is just trading employee satisfaction for dollars.

Gmail is so much better than outlook it's honestly insane. The way it handles email chains is infinitely better than outlooks, which often leads to responses just getting lost when someone replies all to a message that wasn't the most recent.

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if this is 'our' fault, as I'm sure someone will point out. But in the years of using Gmail at my last employer, it just worked.

I love gmail, use it every day. But the chat in the paid corp version of email is so painful. I hate it with a passion. Gmail also now has the stupid left side bar where it doesn't show the gmail folders unless you click first. I wish gmail chat would just copy slack.

I would honestly like to know more about how to make it handle email chains. My work is happily quite email free but recently I've been involved with a company in my private life and I'm finding the email chains in Gmail incomprehensible -- the old emails aren't folded; I seem to have to scroll past millions of copies of the same email signatures with images in the signatures, as well as tons of quoted text from random copies of the group conversation at earlier points in its life, trying to hunt out the "real" last email. Is this normal?

Probably just one person using an email client is breaking its ability to collapse emails? In my experience it was perfect at collapsing emails.

Maybe it's a setting an admin disabled, if it's literally every email chain.

No, this is not normal in my experience using only gmail for all my companies for about a decade.

> getting frustrated at your bugged technology because the parent company decides it can save some money

It doesn't even save money - the cost is just shifted from subscription expenses to lower dev team productivity. Management can't measure the latter as easily as the former, and arguing against switching is a much more complex argument to understand than "this number is bigger than that one".

Management can't measure the latter as easily as the former, and arguing against switching is a much more complex argument to understand than "this number is bigger than that one".

There's a very appropriate classic quote for that sort of situation: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts."

Outlook is more or less fine, but share point and teams are abominations

I want whatever you're smoking. Outlook is the poster child for overengineered software. It's the pointy end of Microsoft's attempt to make their software be all things to all IT department buyers' checklists.

I don't know if its some crap in our top tier banking corporation's customization of Office 2016 suite, but outlook feels I am in Windows 95 era, running maybe some 486 DX2/66MHz machine with fabulous 8MB of RAM and loud clicky slow HDD.

I click on email, it takes few seconds to render that few lines of text. I click on one below, same 3-5 seconds. Emails I read few mins ago. Click on Calendar, again 3-5 seconds for switch. But then teams is same, effin' chat and nothing more, but also has proper UI bugs visible all the time, ie read stuff still has notifications. Having web call in it with screen share kills CPU for good. Our hardware is not the best currently but pretty recent and definitely things should be smooth.

What is it, implemented in javascript?

Then there’s the times people update the bug-tracker-table-in-a-Confluence-page, and Confluence sends an email alert about the edit to those “watching the page (which is everyone who ever edited it). In Outlook the scroll bar literally shrinks before my eyes as it renders the email from top to bottom.

I credit Outlook with the downfall of email as a defacto form of internet communication.

The calendar in Outlook is waaaay better than the Google one, though.

I'm curious whether this approach to career/job selection is sustainable in a downturn. You can do this kind of "I quit because..." thing if you have many opportunities and options. But when things are tight? Good luck to you, as they say.

One aspect of where I work (large old tech company) is that we value those that can adapt. You aren't judged as much by your skill set as you are by how you use your skills or work with the skills others have. Sure, there are limits and this doesn't mean you become the metaphorical frog in the slowly heating pot of water.

They didn't say they'd never work somewhere with MS tools, just that that was part of the reason for leaving. I totally get it. If your employer is telling you a major part of your job is communication and giving you bad communication tools it's like if you got hired to be a chef and were given a camping stove.

There's certainly folks who enjoy the challenge or adaptation, but it does show a certain attitude towards the work and workers if your management doesn't think you need good tools to do the job well.

I'd stick around in a bad job if I thought I couldn't get something better, but it definitely means I'm looking to leave when things recover.

Slowing down laptop refreshes is so short sighted. One of the cheapest productivity boosts you can give someone is a faster laptop. Better than hiring another dev to join a bloated team.

Laptops are not advancing that much yoy and a 3 year cycle is already aggressive.

4 years was the standard for a long time, these days many companies are moving to 5 or even 6 years for laptops.

Hell right now I have employees at 4 years that refuse to change out their laptops because they have no problems with them and want to keep them longer

I was issued a 2015 rMBP and held onto it until the 2022 M1 was available to replace it.

It was barely usable in the end, but I didn't want to be locked into years of crappy keyboard et al when the improvement was Just Around The Corner™.

Yeah but the 2015 rMBP was, like, the One True Laptop. I held until M1 as well, but I think the stars won't so align again any time soon.

My PC from 2011 still works fine. My 2015 MBP lasted until 2022 (when it broke, it was actually still working fine). So I'm skeptical you really need to be refreshing every 3 years.

That's machine durability rather than performance.

Performance translates into more productivity for employees spending most of their time in front of one.

Even JIRA and Confluence are way faster on my 2021 M1 compared to my 2019 MBP due to the javascript runtime being much more performant. Admittedly a bit of a cherry picked example, but still.

Teams for video, not so bad. If they were replacing Slack with Teams, that would be horrible.

> ii) We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing, saving significant cost and simplifying cross-company and customer conversations. This move will be complete by September 1, 2023. We will remain on Slack as our day-to-day collaboration tool.

I really love when one brings in more tools. So let's use Slack for text, Teams for audio and Zoom for video.

It's like most people forgot that in the early days there was a phone and it worked just perfect. Everyone was reachable through it. Now I need to check multiple channels for the same thing.

Yes, that is what I was replying to.

Surely they are just trying to gradually switch everything to Teams. Seems weird to use a slack clone for video chat only but continue to use slack for the chat.

Isn't it more the scheduling of meetings? Does slack have a reasonable way to schedule huddles and integrate them with calendars? My company does scheduled meetings on teams and everything else on slack.

Teams isn't that bad overall compared to Slack these days.

I wonder why they are not talking about the elephant in the room, the AWS spend. Cut back on that and these layoffs probably aren't necessary. The problem is the sheer size of GitHub data and the unreliability of Azure. There is an entire datacenter that is unused because data locality severely limits performance.

Moving from AWS to Azure is an order of orders of magnitude harder than moving from Zoom to Teams.

My complaint is that MSFT had 3 years to focus on this problem and the solution today is to let go of engineers rather than prioritize minimizing costs (i guess in a way they did). There were EC2 snapshots dating back to 2013 when I last checked. Bad management gonna be bad

Pretty much all new features from acquisition news are on azure (packages, codespaces etc).

Which is why outages usually match Azure outages.

Hello fellow hubber? We still deploy new services using AWS or our own internal datacenters. Projects, for instance, is still run on k8s, not AKS. AE development was complicated from the start due to azure capacity, so much so that a tiger team went back to building it from scratch without azure.

Our AWS spending is outrageous tbh

Are they using both AWS and Azure?

Yes

Forcing people to use Teams wouldn't fly in a just world: it's a very cruel and unusual punishment.

That’s very weird pairing indeed. Some people are definitely going to hate Teams just because of the context it was presented in.

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.

-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.

> -Sharing a file in the chat for a meeting puts it into some incomprehensible internal sharepoint structure that is tied to that specific meeting instance and is difficult to ever find again.

And prevents you reusing file names. If you uploaded "image.png" or "notes.txt" to a "Team" (room) once, it will make it awkward if someone tries to upload another file with the same name in the future.

Does it at least pick a good spot for it in Sharepoint? A bit off topic but at my last job we used the Webex - Sharepoint "integration" and it worked the same way but it would just prompt you for where to share it from in the folder structure, but from the root. Inevitably people would just create a folder and share it, but the default permissions on the folder would mean nobody had access to it but the sharer. So you'd add the people in the room (manually) and then when someone new joined the room you'd need to manually add them as well, every time... We were a little surprised that the integration wouldn't automatically grant access to anyone in the room.

Terrible UX.

I think it was at least better than that. I don't remember having permission issues with uploaded files.

It's been a while, so I can't remember exactly where it put them. But the directory structure had the room name in it. As a user I didn't get a choice where they went.

The thing that drives me crazy about Teams is that I can't figure out how to start a quick meeting. Just a single button that is easy to find that when I click it, it just makes a meeting for me. Does not matter the team or organization, just make a meeting and let me copy the details to send to people.

Just checked, press the calendar and click meet now.

On my (Android) phone: In order to use bluetooth headphones, I have to FIRST open the "join meeting" screen, connect the device (or turn off, then turn back on if I was already using it), then join.

Only app that has this issue with bluetooth audio. WTF.

I have a small business and I use teams - as part of office365 it's a fully featured video chat plus messaging tool. It would be redundant to also have slack and zoom (not sure what all github is consolidating into teams)

But it also feels more cumbersome. With unlimited money I'd probably use slack and zoom instead. There are just so many little confusions, weird stuff where a team is has a sharepoint but it's not exactly a sharepoint, and it's never obvious where stuff is, and it defaults to opening office documents in some crippled teams-specific reader instead of their usual application. I know there's logic underneath it all, it just feels more clunky and enterprisy then the relatively seamless experience of other software.

(Edit having just seen the parallel post to mine: the default email notifications are obscene. Getting an email because I didn't look at a message after one hour is super annoying, and is borderline "bullying" in a corporate environment. It's possible to turn it off, but the defaults suck)

> and was never presenting

Ah. There you go.

It's even worse on non Apple silicon Macs. It doesn't seem to care that you have an I7.

Zoom call quality is far superior and the client is less of a pig (if you don't use Team's web version).

Now, for text conversations? Teams is borderline unusable. Given the option I'd rather use IRC (Team search is horrible anyway). If you are used to Slack, it's horrible.

It is grossly inadequate when it comes to searching for and retrieving historical text conversations. For software developers, who depend on being able to search for a decision or mention or piece of code from a few weeks ago, it's downright unusable. Especially if they're used to Slack.

It blows my mind the ways MS Teams finds new and creative ways to mangle and destroy my chat history.

Just about the most important thing a business chat app could do, right?

For me it's that notifications are so inconsistent that I can never rely on them. Sometimes I get them, but sometimes I don't even if I'm actively using my PC. On Windows the performance is ok, but it absolutely ruins my MacBook's battery even when using the ARM native version.

Another thing is that I have to use Intune to use Teams on my phone. Now, I know that's a choice the IT department made, and my employer is to blame here. But at least Zoom and Slack don't even give them the option to mandate bundling literal spyware.

I also dislike the concept of having teams and chats in separate places, with the two having a completely different flow of usage.

Four immediate difficulties:

It will often silently log you out. Then, you're sending messages going into the ether, assuming you are communicating. Except you are not. You have a silent morning w/o any firedrills, until at 11am, you discover you're silently logged out and there was a small popup screen that is hidden asking you to log in again.

You are on a Teams video call, and you cant seem to create another window on your phone to look at chats. Makes no sense.

The real estate required for Teams is so huge. Slack is incredibly space-efficient but Teams is not. Much like MSN Messenger, a lot of the space seems like deadspace.

Cant keep a great group chat by turning it into a channel.

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.

Did video work in Firefox? They must have fixed that. I remember having to launch it in Chrome to join meetings.

Maybe it wasn't specifically Teams, but screen sharing used to be a massive performance hit (MBP around the year 2019). I remember giving a demo, and a response from a keycloak container I was running locally timed out.

It made it very awkward to copy and paste multiple messages in a chat.

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

I think that teams is good for meeting scheduling and conferencing.

For a primary communication channel, teams is terrible.

As long as I can use an IRC inspired tool (slack, discord, irc) to chat, I'll tolerate teams as a virtual conference room.

I worked at a company that used Teams for video conferencing and Slack for chat. The fact that they specifically said "Teams for video conferencing" reminded me of that.

To be honest, it's not awful if you're only using it for that.

I've never used Teams. Why does everybody hate it?

VSCode is often stated as the best-performing Electron software, Teams is at the opposite end.

The video is largely fine for my uses (last couple years it's come a long way), but the text platform is just so bad for me sitting with it and slack at my desk. Like night and day.

Teams has come a long way. It’s totally fine for video conferencing. They are still using slack for chat.

Not half so much as leaving open the question of who gets cut through the balance of H1.

Ugh. Being forced to use Microsoft products is worse than getting laid off tbh...

Another stupid demonym in a layoff letter!

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

If you start the joke format, you have to commit to it.

A Lattician, a Flexporter, ..., an eBayer and a Hubber walk into a bar. But in the end, they can't afford getting anything to drink since they've been laid off.

https://archive.is/QDerR

https://archive.ph/QDerR

non-paywall https://archive.is/QDerR

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.

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.

I also work with a lot devs starting out in their careers and I stand by my comment.

IME the "top" junior engineers are still fine. They can figure out things on their. But the "mid-tier" ones really end up worse off. With proper mentorship and training they might be able to reach, say, 8/10, but with everything remote they end up at 5/10. Basically I haven't noticed the top end of new engineers getting worse, but the average definitely has.

And the "bottom tier" is definitely far far worse. It seems they just get jobs to work the minimum amount and barely do anything (r/overemployed perhaps)

I'm about to leave my job if they don't get enough office space for us. They downgraded to a coworking space with no monitors and not enough desks. I'll never take another fully remote job. 3 years remote at different companies and it's hell.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was out of work for about 13 months, and it was miserable.

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.

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.

One notable contrast I see is that many of the dotcoms which failed had been predicted years in advance based on poor business models where they had no plausible way to make a profit. There are some companies like Uber which are struggling with that but most of these are profitable & won’t be leaving room for newcomers.

Related to that last thought, a lot of people bailed out into Boeing corporate jobs. They didn’t have Aeron chairs but they needed a lot of IT workers as they moved more online. I’m curious how that’ll go now where that process is much further along and things like cloud services have been soaking up geeneric demand.

One thing I see different is back then there were tons and tons of small startups that vaporized.

Now we have a bunch of absolutely massive companies like Uber that have no way to make money, but the overall # of them is a lot smaller.

could you expand on the Uber having no way to make money part?

> Uber reported $595 million in profit

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.

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.

Technically 2020 was a recession. I guess we forgot already.

By many measures (GDP contraction, unemployment) it was the worst recession since the Great Depression. But it was also a very weird recession since massive stimulus, legal moratoriums on evictions and general pandemic restrictions meant that median income actually went up.

What recession? GDP is growing steadily and unemployment is at record lows.

Well, everyone has a first recession. Same situation as https://xkcd.com/1053/

> "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.

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.

> I’m young (35) but I’ve never seen layoffs so continuous.

Go read up on the .com bubble popping.

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

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

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

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.

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.

This is not the case. Companies have already done this and It did not really work. Sure a lot of junior positions were and will be outsourced but the "good" worker will always be paid accordingly. This is why you can see companies hiring in India and then bringing a lot of people to the US.

which is why America needs deflation, or deflationary pressures (such as devaluation of the dollar against foreign currencies expressed as local price inflation) .

Honest question: how can devaluing the dollar be deflationary?

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.

I wrote the below in 2006. <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=178846&cid=14824754>

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

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

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

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

Eh, same thing happened in 2000's and 2010's... it's honestly about 3 years late.

The layoffs are mere fraction of the COVID era hiring. This is a minor correction.

Maybe the techcorrection back to the already lucrative prepandemic days.

Here is some follow-up that's more than just my tweet.

https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-laying-off-10-of-st...

https://archive.is/QDerR

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.

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...

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.

Word of mouth is no layoffs in engineering this time.

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

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.

And perhaps those companies having to eat their own shit will make them finally fix them.

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.

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.

Why is this surprising?

The surprising part of it is, it took so long to dogfood their products.

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.

I wonder if they were told to do X to match Microsoft and it took them a bit longer to implement.

Reminder: Nat Friedman is no longer the CEO of Github.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/11/03/github-gets-a-new-ceo/

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman is stepping down from his role on November 15 to become the Chairman Emeritus of the Microsoft-owned service. Thomas Dohmke, who only recently became GitHub’s chief product officer, will step into the CEO role.

With Friedman, who thanks to his developer and open source background brought a lot of community goodwill with him when he took the job, GitHub remained independent and platform-neutral during his three-year tenure.

The German-born Dohmke is probably best known as the co-founder and CEO of HockeyApp, which Microsoft acquired in 2015.

I mean doesn’t the last sentence say it all?

He's a German automotive industry person (Robert Bosch, Mercedes-Benz). I guess that's the kind of customers they'll be going for now, having won most software companies already. He's got a PhD in mechanical engineering.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashtom

I was just in the process of trying to convince a customer company to migrate from Bitbucket to Github. This (the information about the new CEO) makes me uncertain.

I think it's safe to say there'll be an overwhelming "enterprise"/$LargeCo focus on their work, going forward.

We can only hope that the UX isn't dragged down to stereotypical Microsoft levels in the process.

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.

In 2017 it was relatively empty... but the company filled it very quickly as it grew from 200 to 2000 people. So much so they leased out the building next door and tore down some walls to deal with capacity. Sad to hear it's being shut down that office is truly incredible.

They even had a full-scale replica of the Oval Office there

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

The dojo was cool, and the roof garden, plus the Western themed poker room and the Victorian drawing room with secret book cases that led to other rooms. It was the most extravegant place I ever visited, and as stated, it was almost empty.

Still I got to have a couple of free beers and walk off with branded t-shirts, hoodies and even a baby-grow.

There is no reason to have this. Imagine how many lives they could've improved if they just donated a chunk of the money that allowed them to have offices like this to charity

You're right, absolutely. It's cool but the money they spent here is pretty ridiculous

Or you can view it as marketing spend. Getting lots of attention online from SWEs circa 2016 is far from a bad thing for a dev tools company.

My favorite room was the "secret room": a wood-paneled library which was only accessible via a hidden door: https://twitter.com/cbrasic/status/1623879372116529155

And it wasn't even the most impressive library in the office...

This is the kind of needless extravagance that makes people cynical about the tech industry

That's not really extravagant. I'm assuming it's just a meeting/work room with an oval office theme. It's a very cheap imitation of the oval office. They would have had to buy a lot of the same furniture pieces either way. They just had some fun with it.

I was at their offices back then too. They had and entire section of the office for printing custom t-shirts and an animation room — yes an actual room for 2D animation with the backlit light boxes for paper animation. Also a fully decked out broadcasting room for streaming.

They also had grab-and-go apple products on the walls, like mice, keyboards etc. (Memory is foggy on if they had bigger ticket apple products too).

Honestly, if you are already building a 2K people office, adding a few rooms like this seems like a rounding error.

While getting everyone talking about it.

It doesn't sound like it to me. There's a reason why more responsibly run companies don't blow money on crap like this.

There were similar stories during the dot com bubble, companies and people with more money than sense wasting it. Going on hiring sprees, building opulent abominations of offices, buying toys they don't use, overpaying for celebrity/rockstar employees.

Might be easier to bush off as no big deal when profit (or VC money) keeps pouring in, then when the wind changes you end up closing all your offices and laying off thousands of people.

I’m mostly convinced that is more about signaling than actual inability to do so.

If I can spend a few percent of my net worth on random crap for the fun of it, and not be materially affected, that must be true for people/corporations with a million times more money as well.

A few percent on crappy overpriced office amenities, a few percent on superbowl ads, a few percent on hiring famous bands to play at work parties, a few percent on hiring poorly performing "rockstar" programmers because of their twitter following. Pretty soon it adds up.

You don't think these companies waste all this money on offices and office toys but all their other spending is straight laced and responsible do you? And even if it was just the office crap, that's still irresponsible and reckless spending no matter how large or small the expense is.

This doesn't actually seem extravagant: Assuming they bought (or rented), rather than built, their office, they probably just had a bunch of extra space. Even if they didn't, only a company expecting growth to completely die would build an office with only as many rooms as necessary for the company at that moment in time.

What's more efficient than empty rooms? Giving departments a bunch of rooms to do cool stuff with. The expected return on pretty much anything at GitHub's scale is higher than the cost of stocking a room full of equipment.

And that makes tech people realize some of these execs really believe their own BS.

Wait until you hear about the Chrysler Building.

what about the Chrysler building?

[dead]

Uh wtf

I want to have something more useful to say to contribute meaningfully here. But my brain segfaulted.

They got angry when Trump was elected so they forked the Oval Office.

The office was not there during my onboarding in 2018

This is a photo from March 2016, while Trump was only elected in November 2016.

They had the oval office replica in Sept 2013 before the office officially opened. They also had a huge well-stocked bar, a secret room that you open by pulling a book or similar, a cowboy themed room....

[flagged]

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.

The original seal said "United Meritocracy of GitHub", until they removed it after a backlash

https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/#awesm=~otS2Mwn...

[flagged]

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).

There is also a very fancy whitehouse-inspired conference/war room nearby. And a padded leather whiskey library.

The level of extravagance there was amazing.

wait... why?

I would have assumed that tweet was a joke. Because... why?

That oval office replica was the entrance to the office. The reason they gave publicly was that since it was people's first impression they wanted to make it grand. And since the admin employee was the first person to greet visitors, they felt it was the most important job in the office and wanted to give them a badass desk to do it from.

it worked on me! i was super impressed. and then you leave the oval office and it turns out it was floating in a much larger room. Cool effect, best office i've ever been to. I think they got rid of the desk (or made it not the entrance) when trump got elected

Kinda shows that most people would choose remote and less commute over an office even as amazing as this one.

For senior management + owners this is even better as with the remote-only approach suddenly they have global access to a much cheaper talent pool.

Just wait till Microsoft starts charging a license for vs code and developers heads implode.

Nah, I'd just stop using it and go to something else.

I still use sublimeText which was gaining some traction before VScode took over.

Isn't vscode open-source? I'm using vscodium with all MS links removed, I don't think MS can charge licenses for that.

The really good features that make VSCode worth using (remote development) are not open source.

Fortunately I never left emacs.

Emacs is forever.

vscode would be dropped like a stone

Not until there is a viable alternative.

But with the integration of Github Co-Pilot, they can now make subscription fees from all of those users of VSCode.

There’s already a de-Microsofted fork called VSCodium. Most people would probably migrate there, and development will proceed independently.

Viable alternatives to VSCode have been around since the 90s

The explosive success of VSCode reveals that this is not true.

The popularity of a single development tool in a particular category does not make all other tools in the same (or a similar) category non-viable.

Sublime Text was my go-to for a long time, and still is when I'm not working on a formal project.

I don't understand why anyone would use VSCode, now.

Between Intellij, Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text there are at least 4 better Editors / IDE for any given language.

Tbh for me it’s the better plug-in UX and the built in debugger. Of course I use IJ for real stuff.

Due to JetBrains’s (alleged?) links to Russia, their products are banned at some companies. :(

The founders are Russian, but they actually condemned the invasion of Ukraine, and suspended sales in Russia and Belarus

I've never used VsCode, so I'm pretty sure viable alternatives are around

It's nowhere near good enough that people will pay for it. IntelliJ it is not.

No kidding if I have to pay for it I am going to pay for something that is way better. I use it because it is free (me being a cheap fool) and better than eclipse.

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.

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.

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

I know, right? It even made me take up writing extensions as a hobby. Mostly linters and syntax highlighters for really exotic file formats.

Hold on that could actually happen? It's not officially open source or anything?

No - it won't happen. The core editor is open source.

At best, MS has some limitations around running some plugins (that they also develop) that require the licensed version of VSCode, rather than the OSS build.

Most of those plugins either use MS servers (ex: Live Share) or use toolchains that MS is historically more closed with (their C++ toolchains).

Generally speaking - you can use OSS Code today, without any issues. There's a flatpak here https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.visualstudio.code-oss and many distros package it as the default...

I run arch and it's in the repos as simply "code" - https://archlinux.org/packages/?name=code

I run this as my default everywhere, and it works a-ok. There is a small subset of devs that would likely feel some pain losing the closed extensions, but the total impact feels overblown to me.

The code is opensource, but not the ecosystem. Microsoft is maneuvering towards the same position as Android with respect to Google Play. Not technically mandatory, but so many conveniences are built on it that it may as well be for anyone not interested in investing a lot of time finding workarounds.

I think it is, but there is also a fork call VSCodium without the telemetry, I guess people could just pivot to that?

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

Pretty easy, just release new features as paid plugins that need subscriptions and make minimal updates to the core program.

Just make it part of Microsoft365 and don’t really bother updating the original. Done.

at that point I'd just use vim in a terminal

vim is goat anyway

Is this in addition to the 10,000 people Microsoft announced in it's layoffs 3-weeks ago?

wild how so many companies are laying off 7-15% of their workforce in such quick succession

I assumed that once a critical mass of other companies in this industry make these moves, investors expect this kind of cut from all of them. They'll presumably invest elsewhere if your company doesn't make this cut.

But what’s odd is Microsoft owns GitHub and already did a massive(ish) layoff. Why the separate ones?

Doesn't seem too odd. I believe LinkedIn wasn't affected by Microsoft's layoffs either.

Here's an article describing how LinkedIn and GitHub are both managed separately from Microsoft: https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/26/four-years-after-being-acq...

Wild to see cargo culting so obviously in action

It doesn't appear that any of the big ones are completely reversing their hiring sprees from the past 3 years; rather they are re-adjusting in realizing that can't hit their profit targets at this rate, and that many of their ambitious projects aren't panning out.

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

This argument is so tired. It’s not okay for every tech company to lay off 10% of their workforce. It does not matter that their headcount is still higher than it was a couple of years ago.

This argument also completely ignores the fact that many of these companies, GitHub included, could afford to keep these employees around. When the industry goes on another hiring spree they’ll hire them all back and more anyway.

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

Many of these companies grew their hiring at that same rate before Covid too. Only a few (zoom, peloton, etc) really changed behavior due to Covid, and for them it makes more sense.

yeah, headcount numbers are still net increased. Just jarring to see so many layoff headlines

4 out of the last 5 market bottoms occurred about 1 month after "tech layoff" search frequency peaked.

That’s good data, curious if this will be different with inflation

And there is no way the Fed can reduce rates to bail out this next crash. Hang on people...

Corporations all over the country have figured out that there's some fat to skim off the top, and give to the execs and investment banks, and they're all doing it at the same time so that they can't get singled out for criticism in the WSJ. It's bandwagoning for the absolute worst of all reasons, to the detriment of everyone else in the 99%.

Will go back to hiring in a year or so, it's a cycle

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.

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..

Also since everyone is “laying off their bottom 10%” and then rehiring from that pool thinking they’re hiring the top 10%. Sounds like musical chairs. There’s a old Joel Spolsky article on how everyone thinks they’re always hiring the global maximum

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.

Seen 17-year Google vet get hit on Twitter, doubt they were a low performer

Nope, it's mostly random.

easier to blend in and avoid scrutiny

Anyone made redundant by LLM who is not in a protected class will be fired, otherwise top management violates legal duty to maximize shareholder value.

From Lynn Stout's "The Shareholder Value Myth"[1]; Stout is a former business law professor at Cornell:

> “United States corporate law does not, and never has, required directors of public corporations to maximize either share price or shareholder wealth… State statutes similarly refuse to mandate shareholder primacy… As long as boards do not use their power to enrich themselves, the [business judgment rule] gives them a wide range of discretion to run public corporations with other goals in mind, including growing the firm, creating quality products, protecting employees, and serving the public interest. Chasing shareholder value is a managerial choice, not a legal requirement.”

Such firings will be because management chose to make them, not because they were forced to by the threat of lawsuits by a non-existent legal doctrine.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Shareholder-Value-Myth-Shareholders-C...

That legal duty is at best questionable:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.#Signif...

this is pretty dumb, LLM isn't replacing any actual coders

LLM isn't replacing any actual coders... yet!

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.

Company loyalty was gone 20 years ago or more.

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.

Hey, there is always GitLab!

GitLab also just announced layoffs: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/02/09/gitlab-news/

weren’t they yesterday?

How can you be sure that investor signalling is their motivation?

As opposed to what alternative explanation?

Didnt MS want everyone back in office? I'm confused? Or do github employees now only have access to MS offices?

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.

> 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...

Got it, different perks depending on (sub-)company. Thanks.

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.

say what you will about the recession but since Microsoft picked it up, Github has taken an absolute shellacking. They couldnt figure out how to comply with US sanctions without alienating users, the ICE contract went over like a lead balloon, and the 2014 harassment case didnt help either but the most damning indictment is the uptime and performance.

https://www.githubstatus.com/history

just this year there have been 26 incidents. basically everything that could fail took a knee in just the first two months of this year.

Last year was more than one hundred service impacting issues. Redmond captured the devs, but in the end much like Ballmers chanting its become a pretty meaningless acquisition.

Have you not seen the crazy increase in GitHub's offering? From the richer Projects systems to growing Actions and what not?

Right? It’s cool! I’ve been wondering if the drive there is stemming from Microsoft.

Considering most of the new offerings are hosted on Azure, it makes sense they go down every time Azure does.

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.

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'

You can have understaffed support dept while having overstaffed other dept. Why someone even needs to explain that to you ?

A good thing some company are going all in on remote. In the UK most companies are going back to requiring office presence

What does closing all offices mean? Do they go full remote or employees are going to move to Microsoft offices

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.

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.

It's always been fully remote

They still have 1 job opening ...

Couldn't they find someone internally?

For SEO purpose i think ?

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.

2,500 workers total so 250 will loose jobs.

Best of luck to the folks who get cut finding something better!

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.

Too bad, That SF Office was an excellent spot to visit for various meetups.

Posted about 25 minutes earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735

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.

Closing all offices? That means remote-only right? Sounds like a great place to work once the layoffs are a distant memory

Seriously WTF? I swear none of these companies were anywhere near a need for layoffs.

Do they all just follow the trends?

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.

Off topic but the “More Tweets” section under this tweet is just…full of trash memes.

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.

Gosh, I start to wonder if there will be enough jobs for everyone... :(

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.

when will these layoffs reflect in boom town housing markets ?

They won't. The impact of interest rates on home markets is too great for these tiny layoffs to be significant.

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.

It’s easy to forget that tech is only about 15%-ish of the Bay Area job market.

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.

It won’t. Companies that overhired in lossy areas are still hiring in growth areas. This is a rebalancing, not a shrinking: demand for tech workers still far outstrips supply.

Even if we assumed they are all moving away (they aren't, plenty of hiring still) it would take some time.

> 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.

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.

Layoffs will forever be in the shareholder playbook as long as the market still keeps reaffirming these decisions with stock price increases.

Interesting about the offices. Is it because they are merging with MSFT even more or because they are embracing a remote-only philosophy?

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.

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.

from TFA "The company is also going fully remote, Dohmke wrote, telling staff they’re “seeing very low utilization rates” in their offices."

These layoffs are not part of the Microsoft's layoffs? It's in addition to the Microsoft layoffs announced last month?

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.

The WFH productivity gain optimizations continue. I would have expected more than 10% given the gains claimed here.

Embrace, extend, extinguish...

I hear the low roar of apartment prices tumbling down in SF.

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.

GitLab?

Will they just be using Microsoft's offices?

No, github has always been fully remote.

both git companies doing layoffs

has atlassian done them too

Which is the other than GitHub?

GitLab https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/gitlab-layoffs-company-to-cu...

Does this mean we need to start migrating open source off GitHub? Will GitHub tighten up the restrictions on the free tier?

Good

Gitlab and Github look like they are forked from the same branch. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/gitlab-layoffs-company-to-cu...

git reset --hard

git push -f

git branch -D *

´git blame!

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I'm so tired of this joke/take whatever it is ..

If you're going to use that joke, use Copilot as that's a GitHub product.

And it can't.

And its a boring joke.

Except it can't. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34648167

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.

It's not a metaphor...it's a joke

Step 1: throw some words from your keyboard into a comment box and claim it was humor. Step 2: downvote people that don't laugh. Step 3: someday realize that humor and metaphor are not mutually exclusive.

Or maybe a prediction.

git doesn't have branch prediction

maybe with colab v3 or so.

gpt-git might have branch prediction, but it might also have side-channel attacks

make sure your git branch is set to protected

Nope, just a joke.

xpe is taking everything 100% serious here.

I have a sense of humor; the above was meh

P.S. and that attempt at humor definitely involved metaphor

Their post sounds like a ChatGPT response

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

> Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. — Melvin E. Conway (via Wikipedia)

> The law is based on the reasoning that in order for a product to function, the authors and designers of its component parts must communicate with each other in order to ensure compatibility between the components. Therefore, the technical structure of a system will reflect the social boundaries of the organizations that produced it, across which communication is more difficult. In colloquial terms, it means complex products end up "shaped like" the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for. The law is applied primarily in the field of software architecture, though Conway directed it more broadly and its assumptions and conclusions apply to most technical fields.

Conway's Law does not apply (doesn't say one thing or another) regarding the connection source code and layoffs.

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The worst part of this is that everyone at GitHub is now forced to use Microsoft Teams.

Teams is the result of Microsoft taking a look at Slack and saying, how can we make this feel more like Excel?

I wish I could believe that Microsoft appreciates Excel that much. Excel is one of the most empowering applications ever written and the single greatest thing Microsoft has ever been involved with.

Credit where due, spreadsheet applications were already established AND bundled into suites by the time Microsoft got around to leveraging their market position to make Office the de facto standard. But, yeah, I owe most of my career to making real web apps out of badly designed, hard to use, vile to share, yet somehow better than nothing Excel workbooks. Even with all the modern trappings, and besides specific applications like Photoshop or CATIA, you could probably still run a company on just email and Excel, because people will make Excel do whatever they need, no matter how lumbering the monster becomes.

That undersells the innovation of Excel, which started out as a Macintosh exclusive before being ported to Windows.

It was the first major spreadsheet to be GUI-based from the ground up. It didn’t need Office bundling (which came much later) to dominate, it was by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era.

> by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era

Quattro Pro is waiting outside the door. He says he'd like to have a word. ;-)

What most techies don't get about Excel is that people wouldn't build their businesses around it if it weren't a really powerful abstraction. Sure, a dev could set up a CRUD app, but then you need a dev, which is far outside the budget of most SMBs. Rather than Excel being the root of all evil, we should view it as the empowerment tool that it really is!

When SPJ of Haskell fame was working for Microsoft, he put together a fantastic presentation on this theme:

https://www.lambdadays.org/static/upload/media/1616736415929...