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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
which is why America needs deflation, or deflationary pressures (such as devaluation of the dollar against foreign currencies expressed as local price inflation) .
> 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.
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.
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 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)
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
>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
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.
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.
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)
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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?
> 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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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 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.
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%.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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
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
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.
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).
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.
Also, let's save the National Socialism comparisons for examples involving antisemitism, genocide, and authoritarianism. It is better to have dynamic range in our conversations, otherwise it all gets watered down.
Teams is horrible, but not nearly as horrible as an argument equating use of Teams to the Holocaust. There's a very big difference between using an app to communicate if you want your job and murder.
We've asked you more than once before not to post flamebait comments to HN. If you keep doing it, we're going to have to ban you. I don't want to ban you, so please don't post like this.
I have. It is particularly bad, considering that its technical and UX criteria are not particularly mysterious. Overall, yeah, when corporate policies override reasonable employee productivity, something is off.
I would consider taking a pay cut and moving to a cheap suburb and work for the government or a bank before working for a big tech company that uses Teams. I would only use Teams on a small group or some kind of very highly paid consultant gig.
It's funny to hear this because if I were looking for a job one of the selling points for me would be if they used teams.
I'm on it all day, I present and run video meetings on it. I use it on different devices. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm confident that it will do what I need it to do.
My only guess is you're on a linux desktop and you don't use an enterprise deployment of teams and perhaps you're using the web version of the client. In that case, yes I feel for you.
I'm on an M1 macbook. Teams is extremely bad. I don't know how to describe it tersely other than everything kinda sucks. I work remotely and take a lot of meeting, so it's like my office in a way... an office that's cramped, leaky, ugly, uncomfortable, and cold.
I use Teams on a relatively modern Intel MacBook Pro. My chief complaint is that it murders my battery -- I barely get two hours when I'm on Teams video calls. But there are other issues.
For example, sometimes the window just disappears when it's in the background. When that happens I don't get any notifications, so unless I notice that Teams has bugged out I'll miss when someone tries to contact me. And recently, video has become weirdly bugged -- I see people twitch around like I'm watching a bad horror movie, and sometimes they flash red. No idea what that's about but I can't seem to fix it. It's not going to kill me but it's uncomfortable to watch.
More minor, but search is a mess, and notifications aren't great.
Oh, it also plays poorly with virtual desktops (or whatever the feature is called on MacOS). If I switch from the desktop with the Teams window to another desktop, then cmd-tab back to Teams, it will switch the active application to Teams but won't switch back to the desktop with the actual Teams window. This is infuriating.
It seems to have something to do with the fact that, when on a call, Teams is active in every desktop (with a stupid little video window). But it persists even when you're not on a call.
I use enterprise Teams on a Windows 10 laptop and it is the worst overall chat/conferencing experience for me in over 25 years of technical work.
About the only thing I can say in its favour is that I've rarely had trouble with video or audio quality.
It is an unbelievable performance hog. It launches something like 8-10 processes, one of which defaults to running at above normal priority. Despite this, frequently text chat messages will lag ~30 seconds between notification and appearing in the actual chat window. Even clicking on UI elements like buttons will often have a lag of 5-10 seconds. If I'm on a video call, it uses more CPU than any other process, including my browsers (~50 tabs open across ~10 windows) and a Kali Linux VM running in VMware Workstation.
The UX is awful. For example, there is no way to permanently reorder the list of channels you're in (not even sorted alphabetically). It's always the order you joined them every time you start up Teams. My list of channels is something like 50 long, so I basically just have to search for the one I want, because the alternative is to scroll through the list and read every line.
There are bizarre bugs. Sometimes I'll join a video call, but it will be a "ghost call" where I can hear the participants, but there's no window for me to interact with, so all I can do is close Teams entirely and start over. Sometimes I won't be able to unmute myself, so everyone will wonder why I'm not responding. Today I saw a new one where random members of the call had their video feeds replaced with empty black space (no profile photo/letter).
It's unbelievable to me that I could use IRC, MSN Messenger, and any number of other chat apps on a PC 20+ years ago and get a snappy response time, and yet Teams still feels like it's mired in a swamp running on hardware that's something like 100x faster and with 20-50x the amount of RAM.
Something like 15 years ago, I was troubleshooting a SharePoint issue and discovered that even though it was using a SQL Server database to store everything, instead of taking advantage of the power of a good database design and platform, all of the kind of object affected by the problem were stored as enormous XML blobs inside a single column, with SharePoint doing a SELECT * and then acting as its own terrible inner faux-database layer. I have to imagine that Teams is a similar "don't ask how the sausage is made" kind of situation, where MS basically shipped an early prototype instead of productionizing it.
I used it for two years next to WebEx and it is the worst of all. Not only UX is the worst (cannot have a normal channel, everything is a thread, you cannot change alignment of messages) also the rate of people complaining their Teams does not work was staggering.
Agreed. Probably worse than Teams is Azure, Windows, etc. While things have changed Microsoft would give grief to developers that wanted to run Linux and that was really into open source.
this is terrifying. for all the grief people give Slack, I've used both and I would seriously consider leaving a company that expected me to use Teams long term.
Call me when Slack allows collaborative editing of powerpoint presentations and excel spreadsheets. I think there is little overlap between the part of the companies which benefit from Teams and the part that wants to use Slack.
What you don't like collaborating in the excel web app and wiping your coworker's active cell edit from existence by inserting a row somewhere above it? Next you're going to tell me you don't enjoy powerpoint web app randomly changing formatting in bulleted lists when you do something as complex as hitting enter to add a new line.
You can tell where Microsoft spent their energies (outlook, teams, maybe onenote?) and which web app products feel just about the same as they did when they were sharepoint web apps.
Oh yeah for sure. I think I meant to say on-prem sharepoint web apps. Which were terrible. Just like SharePoint. SharePoint and every single one of its components really embodied everything wrong with Microsoft's culture. It was distilled awfulness, lack of attention to detail, terrible customer experience, awful UX and just insane architecture decisions that still impact 365 to this day. The SharePoint list limit that Teams hit when you added too many people to a team (since worked around or fixed) a couple years ago is a prime example.
No one uses the web app. You can obviously collaborate from the actual piece of software.
Every discussion about Teams boils down to the same thing:
software engineers needs when it comes to collaboration are low so they are happy using an expensive text chat client and they don't understand how the rest of their company actually works and what they need.
I agree. I went on parental leave a couple of months ago but had I not I would have started using something other than Teams with my colleagues with no regard to what the official platform is.
I don't get why upper management thinks they have anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues. I can only assume they would want us to choose a platform that allows us to work effectively.
> I don't get why upper management thinks they have anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues.
The organization has to pay for whatever commercial offerings their teams are using, and any non-commercial offerings are likely to either expose the organization's information or at least put it out of reach of controls like legal holds. Use of some free/trial services for business purposes might also introduce legal/contractual liability that the organization is responsible for.
> I don't get why upper management thinks they have anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues. I can only assume they would want us to choose a platform that allows us to work effectively.
Can someone give me the TLDR on why they hate teams so much?
I suppose I work in an organization with few true "technical" folks, and everyone is under Microsoft licenses so it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
I've used both slack and teams. What am I really missing out on here?
I honestly don't understand the passionate opinions about chat/conference software. They're all doing the same thing in roughly the same way, and I don't have a computer that's ancient enough to really notice resource hogging.
> and I don't have a computer that's ancient enough to really notice resource hogging.
Most likely you don't use a conference software bad enough.
That being said, having useful search, a quick UI and actual availability shown is massively helpful. A great comms tool also makes inter-department chats easy and fun (for example via #random). Lastly, the amount of time wasted with "can you see my screen?"/"can you hear me?"/"Doesn't work for me, I'll restart <software>" varies vastly between tools. Having communication, including discovery and screen sharing, just work makes things so much easier.
> Most likely you don't use a conference software bad enough.
Fair; I could definitely believe that.
But among Zoom, Teams, Discord, and Slack (there's probably another one thrown in there,) I haven't had issues that really stand out to me. I've seen social workplace issues that made comms suck, but they transferred between chat apps.
It really comes down to the details. If the little things don't get on your nerves and you just care about putting messages in a IRC-esque interface that everyone else can see then there's no difference. Here's a really high level tldr: Teams is annoying in dozens of small minor ways that are collectively very frustrating.
For a more detailed take:
Slack is far from perfect but Slack is generally clean, quick, simple and compact. Slack feels like a purpose built tool for chat. Even when they add stuff like huddles it never feels like the priority is anything but the chat. When they roll out updates that make typing or formatting jankier I find they often get a fix out quickly.
Teams feels like it is doing a little bit of everything and is slower, wastes screen real estate, has poor UX all over and does a lot of things so-so to decent vs. one thing really well. Why is chat so different in a Teams/Chat vs a Teams/Teams/Channel? You can't even do the same markdown formatting in those places. And speaking of markdown, you can type a backtick around a string to monospace it like in slack but if it's at the end of your message it won't format it. You need a trailing space for it to kick in the formatter. Little details matter and a lack of attention to them as an organization makes bad UX and weird behavior leak into your software.
The whole concept of a “Team” encourages silos within the company. You can’t just search for and join a channel to collaborate, you have to be invited to a team to even know the channel exists.
If your company is large enough that a flat, open channel namespace is overwhelming, then you might think this is a feature, but I was at Walmart with tens of thousands of people in Slack and I didn’t feel that way.
* Call in 2 minutes, customer sent teams link. You tap it on your phone.
* You expect to enter nickname and connect as a guest (my company doesn't use teams)
* F.. u. Today we're going to log into Microsoft account. No option to abort.
* Personal account doesn't work (bonus points if you already have private office 365 logged in and it defaults to this account, then takes you straight to the error or tells you after 2FA).
* Kill app/reopen? 50% success rate.
After a few times I figured out that best way is to nuke the app data the moment it shows you login screen. And got PTSD.
> * F.. u. Today we're going to log into Microsoft account. No option to abort.
Actually I found a solution for this (on android). Open the settings, apps, find teams app and force stop it. Then try to open the link again. You should get the guest prompt. Sometimes this needs to be repeated few times, but so far this approach works for me reliably.
I have the complete opposite reaction; I don't like Slack now that I've used Teams and I had used Slack since the very early days. The only thing I hate about it is how it handles file sharing, to the point it will change file names of images and converts them to png files, which sort of defeats the purpose.
Indeed, I'd rather use Discord than MS Teams if I wasn't allowed to use Slack. But in reality we'd probably get engineering departments just switching back to IRC and hastebin.
huddle as a lot of limitations. it's good for random adhoc chats but not good for more formal scheduled meeting. for larger companies, using something zoom-like and huddle makes sense.
My company does not have many formal scheduled meetings. Mostly doing huddle to adhoc chat, discuss problems, screen share and pair program. It works well
I love Slack but Huddle is absolutely terrible. Extremely low audio quality with extreme latency (whereas I have superb quality and low latency on Meet and Zoom on same devices/connections).
It's gotten a lot better for me though latency may be a factor here. But I think it's fair to say it's still not as nice screenhero was in terms of quality and responsiveness. Which is weird because that's who they acqui-hired for creating huddles (well, presumably anyway).
The joke is that MS brands its online services as "365", but they have enough outages for people to say things along the lines of "more like Microsoft 360, amiright?"
360 degrees away? Why don't you try this and see how far you get. Look at something now turn a full circle (360 degrees) and start walking, become amazed that whatever you were looking at is now closer.
I don't see where is that a problem?
People who will be using Teams are people using Office 365 daily. Having a cohesive ecosystem makes complete sense. From a UX too.
For meetings, calls, screensharing, and scheduling it's superior to Slack in every single way. Written experience is worse though. If only Slack spent a month writing a "Schedule a meeting with those people, and add the meeting with a link to everyone's calendar" feature, they would be on par.
One reason Slack maybe doens't, is nobody actually chooses Teams over Slack because of feature set. They choose Teams over Slack because it's "good enough" and included with Office360 which they already have. Meeting Teams feature set may not actually get Slack any more customers at all.
We do use Teams and Slack, Teams for scheduled meetings and Slack for everything else, just because Slack's scheduling is non-existent while something great comes out of the box from Teams (and yes, also because we get it "for free" through O365, and wouldn't be paying for Zoom). We wouldn't have to deal with Teams if Slack upped their game.
It's not a cohesive ecosystem. Office + Zoom + Slack* is way more cohesive than Office + Teams. There are specific complaints, but overall one part of it is just the "tool that does one thing well" vs Frankenstein that tries to do everything idea
*except I can't copy paste images from slack into office documents, this is a major hassle
The problem is that Teams is used by companies who have IT departments that do absolutely insane things like DELETE THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some sort of perverse, contrived "security" issue. These are the morons that Microsoft is selling to, and giving advice to as on how to configure it. So you wind up with a system that's almost worse than not having anything at all. Our Sharepoint installation was so bad, Microsoft was hired to come in and "relaunch" it. As far as I can tell, nothing has changed. Teams isn't necessarily evil, but it's a "code smell" about the corporate IT culture if that's what the company uses.
I'm old enough to remember when Skype was really neat, and it's just another in a long, long line of grievances I'll hold against Microsoft till I die.
Companies love Microsoft because of how many footguns they have available in settings and in group policy configuration. The defaults for so many of the applications are actually remarkably nice, and then it is amazing how many IT departments see the massive list of settings and group policy configurations as a buffet of "security options" rather than a terrifying hall of footguns, because who needs feet or nice things.
> DELETE THE CHAT HISTORY AFTER 24 HOURS because of some sort of perverse, contrived "security" issue.
Seems much more likely to be due to legal reasons than for security. If the chats are not retained, they can't be found in discovery. (And given chat is even more informal than email, people probably say a lot of things they shouldn't in chat).
Look, I fully understand the reason given, and, like government programs, it all sounds nice and looks good on paper, but we are simply NOT in that litigious a business space. And, frankly, simply deleting everything as we go seems like something that public safety laws should PREVENT, but I digress.
Back to the "code smell" of the IT department... For instance, I opened a ticket for my new laptop for something that is not common, but it can be self-selected from the menu of requests to make, so it's not like it's a one-off. After THREE WEEKS of emails and chats and calls with NINE DIFFERENT PEOPLE, I found that we... STARTED COMPLETELY OVER. It would have been nice to be able to look back over the history to name and shame, and point people back to what had already been done, since, apparently whatever ticketing system they use is completely useless.
So when even simple things take a month to do in your company, having, say, 30 days of history is not unreasonable. In fact, it's almost necessary.
That seems like a more reasonable policy if you've ever had your email/chat logs subpoenaed. If that stuff's auto deleted, then it's easier to have open discussions there, but yeah, no history.
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.
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!
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.
Well, Excel does not come with a complete broken auth. MS posts stats of how horrible the Internet sec is and it is just that you mostly can't even use the service without going into auth hell.
I know I'm in the minority here, but I choose Teams over Slack any day. I much prefer thread-based chat than message based chat. Teams forces people to use top message as a topic, then respond to messages under that topic. Slack message is just a message. You want to search something on Teams, you get full threads, chat is part of documentation. You want to find something on Slack, you need to click on date of the related message and hope no one wrote any off-topic messages underneath. I often felt like Teams could replace unofficial documentation and most Confluence pages.
Screen sharing, reminders about meetings are also better in Teams.
Ability to add people to "direct message channels" is definitely lacking in Slack. No I don't want to convert this chat with 3 people into a channel, FO. I want to add 3rd person.
> I much prefer thread-based chat than message based chat. Teams forces people to use top message as a topic, then respond to messages under that topic. Slack message is just a message.
Teams, specifically on Mac and Linux, has been a shit-show of instability, weird one-off behavior, blank screens on start, login loops etc for my team. With how amazingly well Microsoft did with Visual Studio Code, it's a bummer how it seems that none of that expertise can be translated to other teams (in this case, the Teams one) as well...
I'm quite confused because almost all conversation in my company's slack happens in threads. Maybe your impression of Slack was formed in a time when they didn't have threads?
I think they’re just saying that teams forces you into using a thread, and make a choice to create a new one if that’s what you want. In slack by default you’re writing a top level message (ie creating a new thread)
Pedantic perhaps but maybe it's worth pointing out that Teams doesn't force you to use a thread. It just makes it the obvious choice since each top level message has a reply button directly on it so it's a single step process. Also when we're talking about Teams there's a big distinction between a Teams/Teams/Channel vs a Teams/Chat which is its own annoyance. They don't even support the same formatting capabilities (e.g. markdown) which is weird.
Indeed, never underestimate the power of defaults. There’s a tendency on HN to say “well, everyone should just use threads on Slack then.” There is, of course, a way Slack could make that happen: make it the default.
(For what it’s worth, I much prefer Slack for communicating, but when I have to find something, I wish I were looking for it in Teams.)
It has "private" group chats in Chats tab and all meetings auto-create group chats. At various points I've tried to push conversations into a proper Team and threaded chat, but the "convenience" of just sending a chat message in last week's meeting chat or some hand-built group chat rather than just finding the right Team channel seems to keep winning out more often than not.
Slacks threading model is super weak compared to other options. I haven’t used teams, but I went from Zulip to Slack a little while ago and it felt like a huge step backwards.
Regarding threads I've seen two options (besides zulip state of the art handling of that). Either hide the threads like slack or throw them in your face like Cisco webex teams.
I'm with you. I only hate Teams because of how resource-intensive it is. It would be my preferred experience otherwise. Microsoft is seriously investing in it, and everyone uses it.
I agree that Slack chat is pretty bad for "technical" (or other detailed) discussions and in my experience the video chat is more likely to not work well.
I'm guessing you have a different experience with slack than I have - because important channels are frequently set to "Alert" - it's extraordinarily bad behavior (to the point at which you are chastised and coached by your manager) - to ever respond to a message in a channel without threading. We have a broad array of "THREAD-PLEASE" Emoji's that you get hit with in the first week or two when you onboard if you do that.
We've taken it next level here - whenever there is an incident - not only don't you respond as a message in the channel, you get a new channel (created by a Bot when IMOC declares an incident) per incident, so all of the activity for that incident is self-contained (can be many, many thousands of messages) - and, of course, even in that split out channel (which is only talking about a single incident) - even there you need to respond on threads, never as a new message.
Have you tried sending code snippets via Teams using ```-fenced code blocks?
The result looks normal. But once the recipient tries to actually use the code, it breaks horribly, because Teams has a habit of sprinkling it with non-breaking spaces.
This issue has been going on for years. I feel it makes Teams utterly unusable in software development teams.
At work I use Zoom, Slack, Teams, Google Meet and even Blue Jeans (due to dealing with multiple legal entities acquired over time that each use their own communications platform.)
Teams is the perfect middleground: it's not particularly good at anything but it's not bad at anything either, and it can do everything.
Slack is as good for text-based communication as it is bad at video communications (we've never gotten Huddle working properly). Google Meet is adequate at video calls, but has suffered serious degradation in terms of functionality over the past year that makes us question Google's commitment to it going forward. Zoom is great for video meetings, doesn't do anything else. Blue Jeans is like Zoom, but expensive and it requires its own special hardware, but its buttery smooth and stable as a rock.
oh have fun, I have to use it at work and it's a lot of trouble all the time no matter which platform you ran it on.
One tip: Avoid the Linux version and use the chrome browser version instead. Wrt. most aspects the Linux version is the browser version but less updated and more buggy (no idea why tho, it's an electron app, it could be automatically always up to date/auto release a update every day/week).
Still even then there are funny bugs like we pretty much every week someone who has problem with a random teams bug, not specific or more often on any version/OS.
Like the chat icon randomly missing or screen sharing/video hanging for one person until they leave and re-enter the call.
And thats with the most minimal usage of Teams only for video calls, i.e. not chat and no fancy setting.
Oh and the Office365/Teams SSO is so inconsistent that it looks like a MITM attack from time to time, well except that a MITM attack probably would work more friction-less.
What is even worse is that when you copy code from it it might introduce no break spaces that wont show upp in a code diff but e.g. break your server config.
I used Skype 15y ago it's a great experience. Recently tried to install teams on Ubuntu it's absolutely shit show, so many url redirects and meaningless erros. Leaving skype as it's would have been a million times better
Call me crazy, but I think that it's premature to think that Microsoft's days of bungling acquisitions are over. They probably will manage to ruin Github, the catch being that it'll happen over a much longer timescale.
Really should have seen that when Atom fell to the sidelines in favor of VS Code.
Admittedly though, I don't see myself using Gitlab anytime soon, if not indefinitely. What makes Github special, arguably, is that it looks less "businessy" and more fun and social.
Another reason why I think the ruination of Github will happen over a longer timescale. Any competitors will likely try to focus on trying to be different (i.e. Gitlab's focus on open source and dev ops) rather than try to focus on on what made Github special and do it better than Microsoft could ever hope to do.
EDIT: just to clarify, this comment relates because forcing teams to use products developed in-house erodes team culture. It's an attempt at assimilation.
For Microsoft I guess the next natural step would be some kind of project management software package like JIRA - well integrated with GitHub, Teams, etc.
I'm not really sure how much more space for innovation there is when it comes to git web services. What kind of killer feature would trump GitHub?
Teams is not so bad. People only use it if there is no other way and no one is sending animated stuff or memes on it..Much better than Slack in that regard
I am absolutely certain this is to suppress wages and employee rights. It is a coordinated effort across the industry and should be immediately investigated.
Hence the need for an investigation. I don't think there is collusion, but I wouldn't be surprised.
My conspiracy (let me put the tinfoil hat on) is that corporates and mega rich people wanted the recession badly because they can benefit from it. But it didn't happen so they're doing the layoffs and increasing prices to manufacture the recession despite their all-time high profits.
Genuine question. How would the mega rich benefit more from the recession than from a stable or high growth environment?
Seems easier to capture a bigger piece of the pie when the pie is growing for everybody no and nobody complains?
Not to mention the social and political unrest which might be triggered by a recession. Recent and old history has shown times and times again that it is when people go hungry or desperate that they challenge the established social order.
In the end it is all about what stock markets expect and want. Before they wanted hiring, now they want layoffs. There is really no collusion.
In general I think the true leadership of many of these companies is overstated. Layoffs are way to appear to save money so they are doing just that. And the pandemic seem to have been growth in remote products, so they had to grow for that. Even if most of the new workforce might not have been needed.
These companies are either setting all-time profit and revenue numbers or just missing last year's all-time records. Wall Street wasn't happy that they just missed their growth targets, but keep in mind that all growth is compounded. So they have never been more profitable, and yet here we are.
What mechanism allowed that? From what I recall corporate bond rates were low but not no cost low. Bank rates maybe were like a few percent but infinity money?
If you were MSFT or AAPL, you could issue 0%(or close to it) bonds and investors would lap it up. IIRC AAPL did issue a 0% bond at some point in the last few years.
The whole experience the last few years has taught me a valuable lesson about how simple and reactive all of these tech companies are. No one really knows what they are doing. Other than a very few special people, most of the leaders at these major tech companies are not super-geniuses. They are human like the rest of us and subject to all that it means... Irrational, over-reactive, subject to the whims of the stock market, etc...
I was a young kid during the dotcom bubble and in highschool during the '08 downturn so I wasn't really aware of the macroenomocic trends in the industry then, but now that I am older and deeply invested in the tech economy it's so obvious.
I find it freeing to know that no one really knows what they are doing. Looking into startup world from academia, it seemed like these people really were thoughtful and strategic in how they operated.
After getting into a couple very well funded startups, and seeing how the sausage is made, you realize that no one knows what they are doing. It's not that they're stupid, just that business is hard and the environment is always changing. Sure there might be some "master of the universe" types, but you can create a good business solving the most immediate and pressing problems.
Getting someone to give you money for a product is always hard. We see things all around us that we and others pay for every day, but that's just survivorship bias. It doesn't stop many of us from thinking it's easy, "there's n-billion people on the internet, if I can get 1%..."
I'm not sure why anyone would think the people running these companies are any more intelligent than anyone else. In some intellect measures like emotional intelligence they are even often quite weak.
The person you are replying is making an apt analogy between dynamics that drove comp up and those that are guaranteed to drive it down. If one was not collusion, what's the reason to think the other one is?
Adam McKay and Charles Randolph wrote a script. Therefore, Jared is wrong about what he is capable of doing and what is he capable of learning. However, Jared is based on a real person - Gregg Lippman. Despite this, after a brief search I found no public information about the arrest of this brother. So either Gregg didn't say this or he said it and it wasn't true, because people in his position would have been told the difference during the course of their life or maybe I didn't search hard enough - but I don't think I should search harder, so if you really feel this is strong support please provide evidence it is so.
I'm more interested in building explanations on reality than supporting my positions with comedic fiction. I'll share some small part of my explanation. I apologize for my lack of brevity.
In game playing we have the ability to calculate the time to calculate and store perfect play in various games. After around the complexity of chess we get to the point where it is physically impossible to store perfect play because the combinatorial explosion generates more states than we have atoms to work with in our universe. This forces approximation, which forces error, which means that for almost every task in this universe error is not only present but absolutely demanded. In multi-agent settings these issues only get worse, because not only is the state space very high due to the combinatorics, but in addition the optimal policy is a function of other policies. The connecting point here is that since our problems are a superset of things we know to be physically unrealizable it follows that error is inevitable and therefore the observance of stupidity relative to theoretical ideals is inevitable.
Founder culture is completely at odds with sophisticated cynicism.
- Paul Graham
No, but it means you should probably have specific evidence of malice before assuming it. It's similar to Occam's Razor: Just because "the simplest explanation is usually the best", does not mean that the simplest explanation is always right. But it's usually a good idea to start with the simpler explanation because a simpler theory is easier to interrogate.
Nah. These are all dumb companies which people shouldn't have joined in the first place. You won't find companies like Valve doing this. Join a good company people, instead of dumb, boring ones run by another run of the mill CEO.
Cause it is a proper company run to solve problems and not make money out of selling vaporware. It also doesn't hire in bulk and has a culture which is a step away from all this madness.
Not that I agree with the above comment, but Valve is a private company. Hence, they would not be beholden to shareholder pressures. Perhaps the argument the posted intended was to never join a pubic company?
Just look at the market since COVID. We're coming out of a bubble. When stocks go way up, companies get drunk on their newfound riches and spend excessively, just like individuals. Then times get leaner and they cut back. Only difference is that individuals aren't usually putting other people out of jobs when they do it, at least not directly.
This has happened many times before and will continue to happen cyclically as long as people are free to spend their money how they see fit. Why would this particular time be the result of some vast conspiracy?
I'm pretty sure you're allowed, as management, to notice what your competitors do and respond accordingly. It's, you know, the foundation of all price discovery. You just can't make actual agreements with them.
Tech companies know what some people are still pretending may or may not happen. The economy is going to get super rough this year and rates are not going to get cut any time soon.
I think you are right but this site is mostly for the "Temporary Embarrassed Milionaires" crowd that identify more with those large companies than with the average worker.
The irony is that many of them are actually part of this layoff reading this and still they don't agree with what is really happening.
The inevitable periodic 'crash' that is part of the capitalist system is a feature, not a bug. It helps suppress wages, keeps workers in their place. So I think you are right on the money.
So many more layoffs will be announced in the coming weeks. But remember: all companies will show (record) healthy profits none the less.
Even the hacker news crowd that lives lavishly and is mostly unharmed by all of this should not feel save at all, you are just as expendable as the anonymous warehouse worker or fast food person.
Speaking of which, the 100K+ tech worker has more in common with the average fast food or retail worker than the owning class: you are worker slaves that fear for their well-being if without work.
Unfortunately I'm afraid the HN crowd is just too comfortable to realise that capitalism is destroying everything, from freedom and autonomy to democracy to the environment.
Yeah that's bullshit. Came from a blue collar home, worked in the trades until I found my way into computers. Don't have a college education and carved myself out a nice career in tech being self taught and hustling for 20 years. From my perspective, this site is not for the "Temporary Embarrassed Millionaires," but unfortunately populated by too many from the "Sad I Missed The Bolshevik Revolution" crowd salivating whenever the opportunity to yell "You're oppressed brothers and sisters!" arises.
I've seen many articles like that, and they conveniently never show the actual question that was asked. If I had an unexpected expense I'd probably put it on my credit card just for convenience, and then pay it off at the end of the billing cycle incurring no additional fees. But it would be silly to include me in the category of not being able to afford it.
You are 'debating' in bad-faith and you know it. Always moving the goalposts, changing the narrative, inventing stories so they have excuses to wave the facts away.
I'd hardly call a 30 year professional career in various fields and collars as "survivor bias." The network of people I've been exposed to over that period of time alone puts a hole in that argument. Tossing out that term to try and justify a terribly flawed argument is as silly as the unsubstantiated statistic provided as emotional evidence.
Any time labor makes headway against Capital, Capital Revolts. Which is why we saw a lot of unionization in the past, it was the only way to make any headway.
Disagree. What we saw for the last 4-6 years was a 0% interest rate phenomenon. The bubble has popped, hiring as a measure of growth is over, and things are normalizing.
No. They all knew they over hired and were simply waiting for the first one to make a move. And, if you look at the numbers relatively, these are barely a scratch with the numbers hired over the last few years.
I am laughing at your "absolute certainty." You probably meant "I have a feeling that I can't support?"
Would you call the previous few decades of tech employers bidding comp insanely high as they competed for talent "a coordinated effort to boost wages?" Why not?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 491 ms ] threadAlso 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'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.
In my social group of about 30 folks, I think at ~25 of us all experienced months of unemployment, at the least.
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.
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.
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.
> Uber reported $595 million in profit
> 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.
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)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
They like everyone else hired too fast and the free covid money boom is over.
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.
Yes, we came back. Nobody learned from the experience.
>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.
Not to mention it gives readers confused context about the link, which is about GitLab layoffs.
P.S. and that attempt at humor definitely involved metaphor
> 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.
And it can't.
And its a boring joke.
Layoffs and having to use teams? Talk about a morale hit
-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.
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.
Terrible UX.
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.
Only app that has this issue with bluetooth audio. WTF.
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)
Just about the most important thing a business chat app could do, right?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Writing bots for it is also painful.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Maybe it's a setting an admin disabled, if it's literally every email chain.
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".
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."
Which is why outages usually match Azure outages.
Our AWS spending is outrageous tbh
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
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™.
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.
To be honest, it's not awful if you're only using it for that.
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
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.
has atlassian done them too
Many of these companies ballooned their hiring during covid, increasing at 20%-40% a year (or more!)
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 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.#Signif...
> “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...
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.
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...
https://fortune.com/2023/02/09/github-is-laying-off-10-of-st...
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.
> 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.
[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hubbers
Some are 100% wfh, vast majority is some arbitrary %.
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.
https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/710956599477534720...
I want to have something more useful to say to contribute meaningfully here. But my brain segfaulted.
Still I got to have a couple of free beers and walk off with branded t-shirts, hoodies and even a baby-grow.
I would have assumed that tweet was a joke. Because... why?
https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/#awesm=~otS2Mwn...
The level of extravagance there was amazing.
And it wasn't even the most impressive library in the office...
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.
Also, let's save the National Socialism comparisons for examples involving antisemitism, genocide, and authoritarianism. It is better to have dynamic range in our conversations, otherwise it all gets watered down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Have you _used_ MS Teams? I'm not exactly a fan of Slack, but it's like telepathy by comparison.
I find the whole premise of these kind of chat tools, combined with cultural patterns of using them, to feel like forced distraction.
It's funny to hear this because if I were looking for a job one of the selling points for me would be if they used teams.
I'm on it all day, I present and run video meetings on it. I use it on different devices. It's not perfect by any means, but I'm confident that it will do what I need it to do.
My only guess is you're on a linux desktop and you don't use an enterprise deployment of teams and perhaps you're using the web version of the client. In that case, yes I feel for you.
Is there an enterprise deployment of teams that makes it not suck on linux?
For example, sometimes the window just disappears when it's in the background. When that happens I don't get any notifications, so unless I notice that Teams has bugged out I'll miss when someone tries to contact me. And recently, video has become weirdly bugged -- I see people twitch around like I'm watching a bad horror movie, and sometimes they flash red. No idea what that's about but I can't seem to fix it. It's not going to kill me but it's uncomfortable to watch.
More minor, but search is a mess, and notifications aren't great.
Other than that I guess it's OK.
It seems to have something to do with the fact that, when on a call, Teams is active in every desktop (with a stupid little video window). But it persists even when you're not on a call.
About the only thing I can say in its favour is that I've rarely had trouble with video or audio quality.
It is an unbelievable performance hog. It launches something like 8-10 processes, one of which defaults to running at above normal priority. Despite this, frequently text chat messages will lag ~30 seconds between notification and appearing in the actual chat window. Even clicking on UI elements like buttons will often have a lag of 5-10 seconds. If I'm on a video call, it uses more CPU than any other process, including my browsers (~50 tabs open across ~10 windows) and a Kali Linux VM running in VMware Workstation.
The UX is awful. For example, there is no way to permanently reorder the list of channels you're in (not even sorted alphabetically). It's always the order you joined them every time you start up Teams. My list of channels is something like 50 long, so I basically just have to search for the one I want, because the alternative is to scroll through the list and read every line.
There are bizarre bugs. Sometimes I'll join a video call, but it will be a "ghost call" where I can hear the participants, but there's no window for me to interact with, so all I can do is close Teams entirely and start over. Sometimes I won't be able to unmute myself, so everyone will wonder why I'm not responding. Today I saw a new one where random members of the call had their video feeds replaced with empty black space (no profile photo/letter).
It's unbelievable to me that I could use IRC, MSN Messenger, and any number of other chat apps on a PC 20+ years ago and get a snappy response time, and yet Teams still feels like it's mired in a swamp running on hardware that's something like 100x faster and with 20-50x the amount of RAM.
Something like 15 years ago, I was troubleshooting a SharePoint issue and discovered that even though it was using a SQL Server database to store everything, instead of taking advantage of the power of a good database design and platform, all of the kind of object affected by the problem were stored as enormous XML blobs inside a single column, with SharePoint doing a SELECT * and then acting as its own terrible inner faux-database layer. I have to imagine that Teams is a similar "don't ask how the sausage is made" kind of situation, where MS basically shipped an early prototype instead of productionizing it.
Oh yeah, this has been happening to us lately. Quitting Teams (not just disconnecting from video meeting) and restarting seems to restore.
But in all seriousness Teams is fine for chat and video.
Voila. Channel. You need to know someone in the channel to add you to the channel, but suddenly you can avoid that threaded bullshit.
God I hate using teams
What am I missing?
You can tell where Microsoft spent their energies (outlook, teams, maybe onenote?) and which web app products feel just about the same as they did when they were sharepoint web apps.
ARE still sharepoint apps. At least that's how they feel.
Every discussion about Teams boils down to the same thing: software engineers needs when it comes to collaboration are low so they are happy using an expensive text chat client and they don't understand how the rest of their company actually works and what they need.
Hahaha...if you want collaborative editing of anything, use GSuite. The MS tool suite is a joke for collaboration.
Some of you don't understand you live in a very tiny bubble and entreprise needs are very different from your experience.
I don't get why upper management thinks they have anything to do with how I communicate with my colleagues. I can only assume they would want us to choose a platform that allows us to work effectively.
The organization has to pay for whatever commercial offerings their teams are using, and any non-commercial offerings are likely to either expose the organization's information or at least put it out of reach of controls like legal holds. Use of some free/trial services for business purposes might also introduce legal/contractual liability that the organization is responsible for.
Auditing and compliance.
I suppose I work in an organization with few true "technical" folks, and everyone is under Microsoft licenses so it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
I've used both slack and teams. What am I really missing out on here?
Most likely you don't use a conference software bad enough.
That being said, having useful search, a quick UI and actual availability shown is massively helpful. A great comms tool also makes inter-department chats easy and fun (for example via #random). Lastly, the amount of time wasted with "can you see my screen?"/"can you hear me?"/"Doesn't work for me, I'll restart <software>" varies vastly between tools. Having communication, including discovery and screen sharing, just work makes things so much easier.
Fair; I could definitely believe that.
But among Zoom, Teams, Discord, and Slack (there's probably another one thrown in there,) I haven't had issues that really stand out to me. I've seen social workplace issues that made comms suck, but they transferred between chat apps.
For a more detailed take:
Slack is far from perfect but Slack is generally clean, quick, simple and compact. Slack feels like a purpose built tool for chat. Even when they add stuff like huddles it never feels like the priority is anything but the chat. When they roll out updates that make typing or formatting jankier I find they often get a fix out quickly.
Teams feels like it is doing a little bit of everything and is slower, wastes screen real estate, has poor UX all over and does a lot of things so-so to decent vs. one thing really well. Why is chat so different in a Teams/Chat vs a Teams/Teams/Channel? You can't even do the same markdown formatting in those places. And speaking of markdown, you can type a backtick around a string to monospace it like in slack but if it's at the end of your message it won't format it. You need a trailing space for it to kick in the formatter. Little details matter and a lack of attention to them as an organization makes bad UX and weird behavior leak into your software.
If your company is large enough that a flat, open channel namespace is overwhelming, then you might think this is a feature, but I was at Walmart with tens of thousands of people in Slack and I didn’t feel that way.
* You expect to enter nickname and connect as a guest (my company doesn't use teams)
* F.. u. Today we're going to log into Microsoft account. No option to abort.
* Personal account doesn't work (bonus points if you already have private office 365 logged in and it defaults to this account, then takes you straight to the error or tells you after 2FA).
* Kill app/reopen? 50% success rate.
After a few times I figured out that best way is to nuke the app data the moment it shows you login screen. And got PTSD.
Actually I found a solution for this (on android). Open the settings, apps, find teams app and force stop it. Then try to open the link again. You should get the guest prompt. Sometimes this needs to be repeated few times, but so far this approach works for me reliably.
*except I can't copy paste images from slack into office documents, this is a major hassle
I'm old enough to remember when Skype was really neat, and it's just another in a long, long line of grievances I'll hold against Microsoft till I die.
Seems much more likely to be due to legal reasons than for security. If the chats are not retained, they can't be found in discovery. (And given chat is even more informal than email, people probably say a lot of things they shouldn't in chat).
Back to the "code smell" of the IT department... For instance, I opened a ticket for my new laptop for something that is not common, but it can be self-selected from the menu of requests to make, so it's not like it's a one-off. After THREE WEEKS of emails and chats and calls with NINE DIFFERENT PEOPLE, I found that we... STARTED COMPLETELY OVER. It would have been nice to be able to look back over the history to name and shame, and point people back to what had already been done, since, apparently whatever ticketing system they use is completely useless.
So when even simple things take a month to do in your company, having, say, 30 days of history is not unreasonable. In fact, it's almost necessary.
It does change one's usage model.
https://www.lambdadays.org/static/upload/media/1616736415929...
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.
Quattro Pro is waiting outside the door. He says he'd like to have a word. ;-)
Excel is so successful that competitors need to copy its bad parts.
Yeah, I don't think they really appreciate the Excel pro scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
Screen sharing, reminders about meetings are also better in Teams.
Ability to add people to "direct message channels" is definitely lacking in Slack. No I don't want to convert this chat with 3 people into a channel, FO. I want to add 3rd person.
Slack has threads: https://slack.com/help/articles/115000769927-Use-threads-to-...
Its the equivalent between a pot noodle and a steak dinner.
Zulip has a lot of other issues though, the app and on-boarding… but I really struggle to enjoy slack now.
teams, however, is a total dumpster fire for serious communication outside of video meetings and some minor ad-hoc 1:1 interactions.
That and DMs being visible to whoever pays.
Discord is by far the best of the bunch combined with Jitsi.
(For what it’s worth, I much prefer Slack for communicating, but when I have to find something, I wish I were looking for it in Teams.)
Yeah, having a feature doesn't mean people use the feature.
I prefer how they are handled in zulip.
in my company, we moved from slack to teams, and EVERYTHING just moved to giant private chats.
We've taken it next level here - whenever there is an incident - not only don't you respond as a message in the channel, you get a new channel (created by a Bot when IMOC declares an incident) per incident, so all of the activity for that incident is self-contained (can be many, many thousands of messages) - and, of course, even in that split out channel (which is only talking about a single incident) - even there you need to respond on threads, never as a new message.
The result looks normal. But once the recipient tries to actually use the code, it breaks horribly, because Teams has a habit of sprinkling it with non-breaking spaces.
This issue has been going on for years. I feel it makes Teams utterly unusable in software development teams.
Teams is the perfect middleground: it's not particularly good at anything but it's not bad at anything either, and it can do everything.
Slack is as good for text-based communication as it is bad at video communications (we've never gotten Huddle working properly). Google Meet is adequate at video calls, but has suffered serious degradation in terms of functionality over the past year that makes us question Google's commitment to it going forward. Zoom is great for video meetings, doesn't do anything else. Blue Jeans is like Zoom, but expensive and it requires its own special hardware, but its buttery smooth and stable as a rock.
One tip: Avoid the Linux version and use the chrome browser version instead. Wrt. most aspects the Linux version is the browser version but less updated and more buggy (no idea why tho, it's an electron app, it could be automatically always up to date/auto release a update every day/week).
Still even then there are funny bugs like we pretty much every week someone who has problem with a random teams bug, not specific or more often on any version/OS.
Like the chat icon randomly missing or screen sharing/video hanging for one person until they leave and re-enter the call.
And thats with the most minimal usage of Teams only for video calls, i.e. not chat and no fancy setting.
Oh and the Office365/Teams SSO is so inconsistent that it looks like a MITM attack from time to time, well except that a MITM attack probably would work more friction-less.
Really should have seen that when Atom fell to the sidelines in favor of VS Code.
Admittedly though, I don't see myself using Gitlab anytime soon, if not indefinitely. What makes Github special, arguably, is that it looks less "businessy" and more fun and social.
Another reason why I think the ruination of Github will happen over a longer timescale. Any competitors will likely try to focus on trying to be different (i.e. Gitlab's focus on open source and dev ops) rather than try to focus on on what made Github special and do it better than Microsoft could ever hope to do.
EDIT: just to clarify, this comment relates because forcing teams to use products developed in-house erodes team culture. It's an attempt at assimilation.
I'm not really sure how much more space for innovation there is when it comes to git web services. What kind of killer feature would trump GitHub?
"We will be moving to Microsoft Teams for the sole purpose of video conferencing"
On the plus side it means that some people will welcome a layoff with severance.
My conspiracy (let me put the tinfoil hat on) is that corporates and mega rich people wanted the recession badly because they can benefit from it. But it didn't happen so they're doing the layoffs and increasing prices to manufacture the recession despite their all-time high profits.
Seems easier to capture a bigger piece of the pie when the pie is growing for everybody no and nobody complains?
Not to mention the social and political unrest which might be triggered by a recession. Recent and old history has shown times and times again that it is when people go hungry or desperate that they challenge the established social order.
It may not be a conspiracy but that is what's happening.
History taught me that the rich benefit from piece and from unrest.
Knowing human greed and that it's always greener on the other side.
But as I said, it's just a conspiracy theory that the recession is being manufactured.
In general I think the true leadership of many of these companies is overstated. Layoffs are way to appear to save money so they are doing just that. And the pandemic seem to have been growth in remote products, so they had to grow for that. Even if most of the new workforce might not have been needed.
These companies are either setting all-time profit and revenue numbers or just missing last year's all-time records. Wall Street wasn't happy that they just missed their growth targets, but keep in mind that all growth is compounded. So they have never been more profitable, and yet here we are.
I was a young kid during the dotcom bubble and in highschool during the '08 downturn so I wasn't really aware of the macroenomocic trends in the industry then, but now that I am older and deeply invested in the tech economy it's so obvious.
After getting into a couple very well funded startups, and seeing how the sausage is made, you realize that no one knows what they are doing. It's not that they're stupid, just that business is hard and the environment is always changing. Sure there might be some "master of the universe" types, but you can create a good business solving the most immediate and pressing problems.
Whataboutism is a word that has been abused badly a lot in the last year but it seems like it fits here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
-Jared Vennett, The Big Short
I'm more interested in building explanations on reality than supporting my positions with comedic fiction. I'll share some small part of my explanation. I apologize for my lack of brevity.
In game playing we have the ability to calculate the time to calculate and store perfect play in various games. After around the complexity of chess we get to the point where it is physically impossible to store perfect play because the combinatorial explosion generates more states than we have atoms to work with in our universe. This forces approximation, which forces error, which means that for almost every task in this universe error is not only present but absolutely demanded. In multi-agent settings these issues only get worse, because not only is the state space very high due to the combinatorics, but in addition the optimal policy is a function of other policies. The connecting point here is that since our problems are a superset of things we know to be physically unrealizable it follows that error is inevitable and therefore the observance of stupidity relative to theoretical ideals is inevitable.
This razor does suck, and it's overused.
Conversely: “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”.
Once is an accident, twice is a coïncidence, three times it's a pattern.
Private companies have shareholders & related interests/pressure as well.
Like a sibling comment said, its overwhelmingly more likely that we’re seeing just how bad leadership really is at Tech.
This has happened many times before and will continue to happen cyclically as long as people are free to spend their money how they see fit. Why would this particular time be the result of some vast conspiracy?
The irony is that many of them are actually part of this layoff reading this and still they don't agree with what is really happening.
The inevitable periodic 'crash' that is part of the capitalist system is a feature, not a bug. It helps suppress wages, keeps workers in their place. So I think you are right on the money.
So many more layoffs will be announced in the coming weeks. But remember: all companies will show (record) healthy profits none the less.
Even the hacker news crowd that lives lavishly and is mostly unharmed by all of this should not feel save at all, you are just as expendable as the anonymous warehouse worker or fast food person.
Speaking of which, the 100K+ tech worker has more in common with the average fast food or retail worker than the owning class: you are worker slaves that fear for their well-being if without work.
Unfortunately I'm afraid the HN crowd is just too comfortable to realise that capitalism is destroying everything, from freedom and autonomy to democracy to the environment.
65%+ Americans don't have 500 bucks to their name. They are one car breakdown from deep shit.
They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it. -- George Carlin
This is of course not true.
https://www.cbs19news.com/story/34248451/6-in-10-americans-d...
In reality, even most people in the bottom 20% of income have more than $500 in savings: https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/average-savings-account...
Bye!
But I have it good so the system works! Yea sure, it’s really anout you. The selfishness, the lack of care for others is so ingrained.
If the majority of your country is dirt poor and has to work multiple jobs the system clearly doesn’t work.
Congratulations, Comrade. By your own logic, your original post must then be dismissed. Glory to the Soviet Science!
Would you call the previous few decades of tech employers bidding comp insanely high as they competed for talent "a coordinated effort to boost wages?" Why not?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735
Eclipse is also still a great IDE with tons of plugins.
But with the integration of Github Co-Pilot, they can now make subscription fees from all of those users of VSCode.
Between Intellij, Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text there are at least 4 better Editors / IDE for any given language.
https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
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.
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.
The supply shortage is so severe that it would take a crushing local depression to balance out.
Yikes...
Couldn't they find someone internally?
Surely, they're not 'overstaffed'
Cisco subsidiaries are being told to use webex in place of slack.
We might be in a new world of chaos
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.
> 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.