Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

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>GitHub was acquired for $7.5B. That's pretty unicorny.

According to analysts, Github in 2018 was still losing money when Microsoft acquired them. This is another example of remote work enthusiasts inadvertently undermining their case. If the strategy is "use remote workforce for happier employees and it doesn't matter if you're bleeding money because one of the FAANG companies might swoop in to acquire you" -- you can see why that narrative is not convincing at all to business leaders!

This is the same issue as citing Gitlab's remote work culture while the CEO (Sid Sijbrandij) mentions they're not yet profitable. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18443014)

Another example is highlighting Elastic's IPO with 700-employee distributed workforce: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18168423

Elastic has also been losing increasing amounts of money for the last 3 years (see their SEC 10-K filings) and has never had a profit since their IPO. They lost $109 million in 2019.

To be fair, it doesn't mean that financial losses should be blamed on remote work -- but you also can't use them as positive case studies either.

tldr: do not cite Gitlab/Github/Elastic as evidence of remote work "being a success" to convince skeptical business managers.

To re-iterate the issue: the Remote Work Movement still needs a slam-dunk-world-beating story of its success. They haven't gotten one yet that convinces skeptical business leaders to fully adopt it.

What if Github was specifically optimizing for that end-goal though? It is hard to definite what productivity means unless you had inside knowledge of the goals of the business. Amazon took 14 years after their IPO to turn a profit, but that isn't to say that their employees were not productive. In the same vein, Github may have never turned a profit, but if that was not the goal, it's hard to say if their remote employees were not productive.

>, it's hard to say if their remote employees were not productive.

Yes, Github remote employees were productive in an absolute sense. The employees obviously created a usable website with enterprise customers before MS acquired them.

Instead of absolute productivity, the issue is if remote worker is more productive relative to office workers. (See the 3 repeated claims from the author I quoted in my first post.)

What we want is for Github's remote workforce to demonstrate such obvious superiority that it causes Bloomberg/WSJ/HBR to write articles explaining how business managers are incompetent idiots for not fully adopting remote work. But that didn't happen because Github wasn't successful enough to influence the business landscape like that.

In contrast, the business media has already written plenty of stories about Google's lavish perks like free food to help improve productivity of workers. So far, influential business publications have not highlighted Github's remote culture as a competitive advantage.

> Google's lavish perks like free food to help improve productivity

Out of curiosity, are there any actual documented improvements, or is it the same "this makes us more productive" that we're talking about the remote promoters spouting?

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