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Comment by electrondood | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While getting everyone talking about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait until you hear about the Chrysler Building.

what about the Chrysler building?

Uh wtf

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

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

The office was not there during my onboarding in 2018

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

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

On the seal: "melius simul quam solus" means: "better together than alone." On the scale of extravagant perks and celebrations of success it is a fairly minor and inexpensive one.

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

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

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

The level of extravagance there was amazing.

wait... why?

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

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

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

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

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

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